TIONESTA, PA — Janet Furst, 64, who has never watched a complete college basketball game in her life, holds the only undefeated bracket in the Tionesta Volunteer Fire Hall pool as the Sweet Sixteen field finalized Sunday night.
Furst’s methodology, which she explained without prompting to anyone within six feet of the coffee urn in the Fire Hall basement, involved selecting the team in each matchup whose head coach looked, in her estimation, “the most tired” on the small clipped photos pool organizer Earl Sembower had affixed to the bracket sheet. Ties were broken by which team name “sounded the most like a small mammal.”
This is how Furst arrived at her Sweet Sixteen, which contains both Round of 32 upsets — wins she correctly called, she said, because the winning coach in the first looked “like a man who had recently lost a dog,” and the losing team in the second wore “two oranges that did not get along.”
Furst has also, according to several pool members, begun referring to specific teams by descriptive phrases rather than their names. Tennessee is “the orange ones with the mean coach.” Houston is “the red ones whose coach also looks mean but in a different way.” She refers to both Duke and North Carolina simply as “the navy,” and when pressed will clarify “the navy I trust” or “the other navy.”
Russell Padgett, a retired track inspector who attends the pool’s weekly review night and currently sits 41st out of 43, was less philosophical. “I put in fourteen hours,” Padgett said. “I had a KenPom printout. I had Marquette to the Elite Eight on guard maturity.” Padgett’s bracket is broken in eleven places.
Fire chief Daryl Houchens, who placed 38th by selecting the higher seed in every matchup and then changing his mind on three of them at the last minute, confirmed Furst would receive the $340 pot if her bracket survives Monday. “She doesn’t really know it’s a tournament,” Houchens said. “I think she thinks it’s a survey we’re all helping her with.”
Asked Sunday whether she planned to watch any Sweet Sixteen games on Thursday, Furst said she had a quilt to finish and would probably check in with the standings Friday if she wasn’t at her sister’s in Oil City.