I’m not doing very well in my 2025 NCAA College Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket. This year I decided to make my picks based upon my long-held religious belief that God is a basketball fan. Accordingly, I picked any schools with a religious affiliation to win all their games. If you are following the tournament this year, you will know that three teams I had going deep into the tournament – Gonzaga, St. Mary’s and St. Johns – didn’t make it out of the second round.

BYU is still alive as I write this. In some cases I didn’t know for sure if a school had a religious affiliation or not. This includes Creighton, Lipscomb, Bryant, Liberty and Grand Canyon. In all five cases I erred on the side of inclusion. (In the case of Grand Canyon, it was easy since I’ve always thought God was a tree-hugger, and there are lots of trees in the Grand Canyon). None of the five made it out of the first round. The obvious conclusion to draw from this experience is that God is not a basketball fan after all, and perhaps there are not really all that many trees in the Grand Canyon.

On the plus side of this year’s tournament, the combination of lousy weather and a painful jump-roping injury confined me to the couch for a couple days where I was able to watch lots of games involving teams I didn’t have in my bracket. My jump-roping injury is a lot more masculine than it sounds. I suffered it at one of the Island’s newest and most exclusive gyms called Club Clif. Besides having a couple of very manly black jump ropes, the gym includes actual weights and exercise equipment. And the price is right – you just have to bring an extra beer for the proprietor for the post-workout debriefing session. My jump-roping injury has largely healed, although my self-esteem hasn’t. But I’ll continue to nurse it through the upcoming Sweet Sixteen and Elite 8 right through the National Championship game just to be safe.

Basketball has always been my favorite sport and the one I was best at, which tells you all you need to know about how aggressively mediocre I was in all other sports. Being under six feet tall, I played point guard or shooting guard all through high school and played intramural basketball through college and law school. My specialty was the three point shot, which, in what is basically the story of my life, didn’t exist as a thing until after my competitive basketball days were over. I know that many of the baskets I made in my college intramural days would have been three-pointers if there had been a three-point line when I was playing. Recently, I wrote a letter to my college’s Intramural Sports Office and requested that they go back into the school’s intramural basketball program’s archives and update my records to reflect the total number of points I would have scored if the three-point rule had been in effect at the time I was playing there.

I got a surprisingly prompt, albeit fairly snippy, response indicating that the school did not compile intramural sports records, much less save them, and that even if they did, they would have no way of knowing where I scored my points from at the time. I sent them a polite response and offered to provide the missing data myself based on my own detailed personal notes from all the intramural games I played from 1977 through 1980. I may have also hinted that if my reasonable request continued to be ignored, I would have to consider terminating my alumni donations to the University.

My generous offer was pretty quickly declined in a second testy letter. The letter also mentioned that they had pulled my permanent file to confirm whether I was ever actually a student at the school, and in looking at my file they determined that, while I did appear to have attended and graduated from the University, they found no record of my ever making any alumni gift to the University. The letter concluded by saying the University regretted they couldn’t change my nonexistent intramural sports records, but the University’s Bursar’s Office would like to talk to me about some outstanding library late fees and a missing graduation cap and gown.

I couldn’t end my digression on basketball without relaying the reason comedian Rita Rudner said you can tell that men own all the professional basketball teams: “Every year cheerleaders’ outfits get tighter and briefer, and player’s shorts get baggier and longer.”

In conclusion, may I just say Go Houston!

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.