You can win your March Madness office pool by following these easy tips. No, really, you can

There’s a trope that gets trotted out this time of year that goes something like this: Why am I laboring over my March Madness office pool picks when it’s probably going to be won by a receptionist who makes her selections based on whose uniform is prettier or whose mascot is cuter?

It’s time to retire that chestnut for good — for two reasons.

First, it’s sexist and gross.

Second, unless you’re a hardcore college basketball fan, you don’t have much more actionable knowledge than our fictional receptionist, do you?

When I look around the TribLive.com water cooler, I see about three people who actually have expert level knowledge of college basketball, and Jerry DiPaola is in Dayton covering the Pitt game.

I’m sure your office is the same.

And therein lies the reason why we should all fill out a bracket before the ball is tipped Thursday afternoon. If your aim is to win one of these online contests where the author of a perfect bracket pockets millions, you should wake up. But if your aim is to just do better than 30 or 40 lunkheads you work with, this is a winnable bet.

Here are some tips based in math that could give you a leg up:

First round

• Seeds 10-12 historically pull off the first-round upset 35-40% of the time. What I’ll do is look at the whole bracket and pick five upsets in that seed range. Pick one and you’re being too cautious. Pick 10 and you’re being too risky.

• Seed 13 wins about 20% of the time and seed 14 about 15% of the time. I’ll pick one of each of those.

• It’s true that a 16 seed has beaten a 1 seed once in the first round. UMBC famously shocked Virginia in 2018. But I’ve also driven the green on a par 4 once. Just because it happened one time doesn’t mean it’s ever going to happen again.

Beyond the first round

• It’s rare for all four 2 seeds to make the Sweet 16. It’s only happened twice in the last 25 years. I’ll pick one of them to fall before then.

• It’s rare for all four 1 seeds to reach the Elite Eight. It’s only happened once in the last 12 years. I’ll pick one of them to fall before then.

• About 80% of the time, the Final Four has one or two 1 seeds in it. It rarely has none, three or four.

• Don’t be afraid to pick a Cinderella. There has been one 7 seed or worse in the Final Four eight of the last nine years. But just pick one. Let’s not get crazy.

So now that you’ve decided how many upsets to pick, you’ve got to choose which teams will be pulling off the upsets. Remember, you don’t know enough about college basketball to make informed decisions. It’s better to make uninformed decisions as fun as possible.

• In the first round, pick based on which city you’d rather spend this weekend in. Why did I pick Cal Santa Barbara to upset Baylor? Sorry, Waco, Texas.

• Basketball was invented by a Canadian. Pick the school that is closer to Canada. Gonzaga sails into the Sweet 16.

• In the third round, pick the school that would produce the better Scrabble score. Again, things are looking good for Gonzaga.

• Beyond that, come up with the most famous alumni of a school you can think of. Pick whichever one’s cooler.

As such, you can expect Orville Redenbacher and Neil Armstrong to be celebrating as Purdue cuts down the nets the first Monday in April.

You heard it here first, from a lifelong hockey writer who has watched four college basketball games this season, three of them in the past week. Yeah, I’m who you’re competing against. You can do this.