POKE'MADNESS!!!

One of my best friends, Johnny Pham, is notorious for having little to no knowledge of professional sports. Sometimes you can tell he is joking (like when he says things like, "Coy McColt just shot a home run!" or "Hey, what's Uncle Emmitt doing on TV?") but otherwise I'm pretty sure he has no real interest in sports.  I think if he had his way, he'd lock himself in his room and play the Sims all day long or spend his time collecting every Pokemon on his iPhone.

The way I figure it, if Johnny understood sports a little more then he'd probably be more interested in them.  Don't get me wrong, he's a really smart guy; he just needs a little push in the right direction.  So I have devised a plan to help him.

With the NCAA basketball tournament just around the corner, I've prepared a new form of "bracketology" that I believe provides a good balance between athletics and one of Johnny's favorite pastimes: Pokemon.

I present to you, POKE'MADNESS:

What I've essentially done is merged each of the tournament teams' mascots with a Pokemon sharing similar, physical characteristics.  So for example, Harvard's school mascot is "The Crimson", which after a lot of googling I finally determined is basically some f-ugly Pilgrim:

So what I have done for Harvard (who, since originally posting this, did NOT make the tournament) is find a matching Pokemon that somewhat resembles the teams' mascot.  In this case, I took the Pilgrim hat and meshed it with this squid-like Pokemon:

Ending up with this hybrid Poke'Mascot:

So there ya' go.

Selection Sunday is still two days away so I won't have the final team listings until then but as soon as the final bracket is posted I will begin to list the head-to-head battles for each round online.  I hope this will serve as a happy medium between die-hard sports fans and Pokemon fans alike.  Stay tuned!