ESPN Say: Confucius Write Team Capsules

Once upon a time, we sat helpless and confused, unshaven and malnourished, aimless and overwhelmed, completely consumed by the Madness.

But it was then that an angel appeared… on our monitors… in the form of of a Flash-generated pop-up window, offering us the direction, purpose, and perhaps even the meaning of life!

Yes, folks, ESPN has found an enchanting way to offer up its tournament advice in the form of hovering windows that ambush your cursor when loading up its Men’s Tournament Challenge contest. An applet that forgot to include team seedings on Sunday night has been patched to include both seedings and, now, team capsules! The picture above is a screen shot of what ESPN has to say about 15-seed Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, that is, if you happen to leave your mouse pointed at the team’s name for longer than three milliseconds. (What can we say, ESPN is a bit jumpy!) In case you didn’t already know that a school which looks like an equine steroid when abbreviated (TAMU-CC) is just happy to be playing, well, now you’ve got some clarification. We might be in the minority… but we had no idea!

Though this is probably a swell idea, we find it mildly funny that ESPN offers no new information or definitive advice whatsoever (probably to keep the lawyers at bay). In fact, nearly all statements are left open-ended (some are even cut off), entirely for your interpretation… thereby making the tentative process of filling out a bracket just a little more tentative.

Next year, we’d suggest firing Confucius from the writing them and turning the whole capsule creation project over to a staff writer looking for his or her foot in the door.