Winning Fiasco strategy: “I just picked against you, Mark”

My predictions can be perilous things. I had the Rams beating the Patriots 42-3 in the 2002 Super Bowl. I had the 1996 Braves as a possible match for the ‘27 Yankees. I had the 2008 Georgia Bulldogs winning a national title in a year they couldn’t manage a state championship.

But never in a career of being wrong have I been confronted so bluntly with the reality of my reputation. The winner of the 22nd Final Four Fiasco — my own little contest — won because he read what I’d written and took countermeasures. Why, I asked, did Joe Kingston go with Michigan State?

“I picked that because you picked Louisville,” he said. “That was just against you, Mark.”

Kingston, who’s 67, is retired from Automatic Data Processing. He lives in Decatur. He once won a Final Four contest in the workplace around 10 years ago. “I got 75 bucks,” he said. This time he gets the coveted winner’s Final Four sweatshirt, which should come in handy.

Kingston works out at a gym wearing what he calls “a ragged [North] Carolina T-shirt.” (Is it me, or are there more Carolina fans in Atlanta than Braves fans?) He didn’t attend UNC — he’s a graduate of Saint Bernard College in Cullman, Ala. — but has long liked the Heels, and his daughter Amy is indeed a Tar Heel alumna.

Amy is an attorney in Washington, D.C. Her husband of almost a year, George Walborn, is a graduate of Villanova. Affinity for those two schools went a ways toward generating half of Kingston’s winning Final Four, but he worries that Saturday night’s Carolina-Nova collision will have an unsettling effect. “It’s the first test of my daughter’s marriage,” he said.

Kingston sees Carolina winning that game and then beating Connecticut in Monday’s final. Having ridden MIchigan State to Fiasco victory, he’s done with the Spartans. “UConn’s big guy [Hasheem Thabeet] is too tough.”

Our champ reigns over a field of 2,124 contestants by virtue of tiebreakers. He tabbed all eight regional finalists correctly, and he had 13 of the Sweet 16. (He missed on Wake Forest, Florida State and Maryland — so much for loyalty to the ol’ ACC.) But Kingston was no more giddy in his triumph than Eddie Cook of Norcross was in coming close.

“After 21 years of faithfully entering your contest and coming up way short, I finally got a taste of what it feels like to pick the Final Four correctly,” Cook wrote in an e-mail, “and it tastes good … While I’m on this roll, I’m going to go buy a lottery ticket — 22 will be my Mega Ball.”

And what about the young genius Elizabeth Bradley, who’d outpicked her dimwit dad by nailing seven of the eight Final Four qualifiers over the past two seasons? To her chagrin, she got only two this time. (Dad, in a comeback, had three.) Even so, she burnished her growing legend by nailing 14 of the Sweet 16 — better even than Kingston or Cook.

As the Fiasco goes forward, let that be a lesson: You might profit by picking against me, but don’t try that stuff against my Lizzie.