Brackets day! The day in which it really doesn’t matter how much or how little (in my case) you actually know about college basketball.

Hey, I enjoy college hoops. But I couldn’t tell you, right now, without looking, if Valparaiso is in or out, or even if that’s how you spell it.

But I have won these stupid bracket things in the past simply by picking the eventual champ. The last time I won an office NCAA pool and pocketed all the “points” I picked Duke in a year when Duke wasn’t the fave, and it won. So I’m picking Duke again. Plus, I wanted to go with a player I covered in high school. So I was kind of down to Taj Finger of Stanford or Keith Benjamin of Pitt in terms of local kids with a real shot. Then I remembered that I covered and interviewed Blue Devils point guard Greg Paulus when he quarterbacked CBA to victory in one of the best football games I’ve ever seen, at the Carrier Dome against New Rochelle. So that’s another reason to go with Duke. Plus, I just came back from the state tournament, and the Haldane Blue Devils won the state Class C tournament.

Hey, these are reasons as good as any, right? I mean, my wife used to fill out my college football contests and she’d pick Purdue because she likes their chicken. It worked pretty well for her.

Anyway, myself and fellow Journal News/LoHud.com staff writers Peter Abraham, Kevin Devaney Jr., Sam Borden and Sam Weinman are doing brackets as part of the LoHud.com contest—and part of a separate bragging rights contest among us.

We want you to go mano-a-mano (or womano-a-mano?) with us. Go to Lohud.com/brackets  and see if you can’t outsmart us. Or me, because I’m figuring I’m a shoo-in against those guys. None of them really covers college hoops, and none has my system for picking teams. Oh, you can also win prizes, and up to $10,000. But obviously, trying to beat us is more important than money.