INDIANAPOLIS, IN — The NCAA tournament narrowed to its Sweet 16 field Sunday afternoon, with the bracket currently atop the Meridian Logistics fourth-floor office pool belonging to a payroll administrator who selected every game based on which mascot she would be most willing to hug.
Brenda Kalb, 51, has not watched a single minute of basketball, does not know what a seed is, and at one point during Friday’s coverage asked aloud whether Gonzaga was a country. She is up $340 and leading 47 coworkers, including three men who have each spent more than nine hours of company time on KenPom this week.
“The bird one looked mean, so I went with the other bird,” said Kalb, referring to a Round of 32 game she could not name, against an opponent she could not name, in a sport whose objective she described as “the one where the tall ones run back and forth.” Her tiebreaker total points figure — 138 — was arrived at by adding her two grandchildren’s ages and multiplying by something she described as “a feeling.”
According to Dax Reinholt, who runs a March Madness analytics newsletter out of a converted sunroom in Carmel, Indiana, Kalb’s methodology has now outperformed his proprietary 14-variable predictive model for the third year running. “She picked Drake because she liked the duck,” Reinholt said, staring at a whiteboard covered in tempo metrics. “The duck was correct. The duck was correct, and I am not.”
Trailing Kalb by a single game is senior account manager Greg Pflug, who built his bracket using adjusted defensive efficiency, transition turnover rate, and a spreadsheet his wife has asked him to stop emailing her. Pflug declined to comment beyond gesturing at his monitor and exhaling through his nose for what witnesses described as “a concerning duration.”
Sources within the office pool confirmed that Kalb has correctly picked all four 12-seed upsets, two 14-seeds, and a Final Four that she described as “the four with the colors I like together.” When asked her championship pick, Kalb said “the one with the dog,” then clarified she meant the husky, then clarified she meant the bulldog, then said it didn’t matter because they were both “good boys.”
Pool commissioner and IT manager Tomas Wexley, who has run the bracket for nine years, said Kalb’s lead has produced what he termed “a real morale situation,” noting that several employees have begun openly resenting a woman who keeps a framed photo of a corgi on her desk and refers to halftime as “the intermission part.” Three coworkers have reportedly asked Kalb who she likes in the Elite Eight; she has reportedly answered, in order, “the cat,” “the bear,” and “oh, is there a ram one?”
At press time, Kalb had stepped away from her desk to microwave a Lean Cuisine, leaving her bracket displayed on a monitor that the entire fourth floor was now walking past slowly, in a state observers described as somewhere between admiration and grief.