The small time

 Time now to peruse your soon-to-be-ashy bracket, and also to decipher the great mysteries that lie within it -- like how Purdue wound up with a 4-seed after losing six of its last nine games, and why the bracket nerds suddenly think Indiana got snubbed after a fair number of them figured they were toast three days ago.

(A lot of this, it seems, stems from the fact North Carolina got in with a less-impressive resume and its athletic director, Bubba Cunningham, is chairman of the selection committee. Supposedly he recused himself when the Tar Heels were being evaluated. Supposedly.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, Purdue's a 4-seed in the Midwest and Michigan, which beat the Boilermakers twice and squashed them by 18 enroute to the Big Ten tournament title, is a 5-seed in the South. This means the Wolverines get the dreaded 12-5 matchup with the UC-San Diego Tritons, who are 30-4 and probably didn't win any of those 30 by accident.

Purdue?

Well, Purdue gets 13-seed High Point out of (where else) High Point, N.C., a Methodist school with an undergrad enrollment of 5,135. The Panthers are 29-5 and champions of the Big South Conference. Their school colors are purple and white, and their mascot is Prowler the Panther, which sounds vaguely skeevy if you think about it. 

Their two best players, on the other hand, are an interesting pair. One is Kezza Giff, a 6-2 guard from Paris. The other is Juslin Bodo Bodo, a 7-footer from Cameroon. If this were last season, Purdue could have countered with a Canadian, but Zach Edey does his thing with the Memphis Grizzlies now.

I don't know if Kezza, Juslin and the rest of the Panthers can hand Purdue a first-round shocker for the third time in four years. I doubt it. But if Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer go a combined 2-of-13 from the 3-point arc again, all bets are off.

So who am I picking to win it all?

Come on, you know this isn't the part where I do that. This is the part where I pick my favorite teeny-tiny doesn't-have-a-prayer team to root for.

Gotta say, I'm sorely tempted to pick High Point. But if I did that, the vengeful spirit of my mother, a Purdue grad, would come down from heaven and force-feed me liver-and-onions or something similarly vile.

No one wants that. Especially me.

So, sorry,  Prowler, you creepy stalker you. High Point is out.

Instead, I'm going with ... the Wofford Terriers!

I mean, come on, what's scarier than a terrier? Yorkies run screaming from terriers. Shih-tzus, too. They're the fiercest of your small-to-mid-size dogs, to paraphrase what David Letterman, a Ball State Cardinals grad, once said about his alma mater's mascot.

Anyway, Wofford is another Methodist school, which is not why I like it (although I was raised Methodist). Why I like it is because it's got some age on it; it was founded 171 years ago, in 1854, in Spartanburg, S.C. That means it sent boys to the Civil War on the wrong side, and also that its endowment was for a time in money with Jefferson Davis' face on it. This did not prove to be a wise financial decision once the Confederacy fell.

Wofford is even smaller than High Point, with an undergrad enrollment of 1,800 as of 2020. Its best players are Corey Tripp, a 6-3 guard out of Medina, O., and Kyler Filwich, a 6-9 center from Winnipeg (another Canadian!) who shoots free throws underhand, like Rick Barry. The Terriers got in because they won the Southern Conference tournament after an underwhelming regular season in which they went 19-15 and finished sixth in the SoCon.

None of that matters now, though. They're in Da Tournament as a 15-seed, and Thursday at 6:50 p.m. they play 2-seed Tennessee in Lexington, Ky. They're almost certain to lose big, but, hey, you never know. Terriers, remember?

Fierce. Determined. Bite the living hell out of your ankles.

Chomp 'em, Terriers. Chomp 'em.