No one would blame you if you took this opportunity to go live in the woods for the next several years to escape the shame of it all.

But March Madness pools are a million-dollar industry at this point, and anyone who never has participated or at least never been asked to must have been living under a rock. They almost always have some kind of system for it. For instance, I once knew a guy who based his picks on which team’s mascot he thought would win in a fight.

And ESPN seems to have embraced the idea of non-fans using peculiar systems for their picks, or so one of their recent commercials would suggest. Everything from a cootie-catcher to wind-up toys to tarot cards to a homemade game of Plinko is used to determine which teams will reign victorious, and I haven’t even listed half the things in the commercial. And really, as random as the tournament tends to be, you’d probably be served just as well by one of the above methods as intense statistical analysis. Besides, who doesn’t want to take every excuse to build and then use a Plinko board in their backyard?

“I’d totally use Plinko for everything in life,” hospitality business senior Brittany Friddell said.

Nobody would mind, I suspect, if such entrants weren’t successful. That is, if they didn’t almost always outperform us supposed experts. Supply chain management junior Eric Price suggested that people who follow college basketball are at a disadvantage because they tend to overanalyze their picks, leading to picking a mid-major to upset a heavyweight and then seeing that mid-major promptly lose by 20.

“I know people who won’t pick teams they haven’t heard of,” Price said.

That is, they only pick teams who are well known, like Duke or North Carolina.

That might not have worked so well last year, because Butler and VCU made the Final Four — and seriously, if you picked VCU to make it that far, please come give me stock tips, I beg you — but you would have been well-served to pick Kentucky and eventual champion Connecticut.

Some people have a slightly more elaborate system. Journalism junior Alyssa Firth said she knew someone last year who won a pool in which they picked as many dog or dog-like mascots as possible when the Connecticut Huskies took home the title. She said she personally based it on what state the schools were from.

Then there are the systems that sound simple in theory but get considerably more complex as you actually attempt to implement them, such as the one Friddell espouses.

“I generally choose based on what teams I think deserve it,” she said. “And I obviously think MSU deserves it this year.”

Of course, methods like Friddell’s will only get you so far. With 63 games to pick — not including the play-in games or the First Four, as it’s now known — it’s hard to pick every game the same way, even when you think you know things about basketball. I don’t know one single thing about New Mexico or Long Beach State, but I have to pick somebody. In those instances, Friddell said she usually falls back on picking teams she knows either a friend or family member roots for.

March Madness is pretty much a part of American culture at this point. Whether it’s the aforementioned co-worker, the president of the U.S., or a retired college coach who’s really into analytics, everyone enjoys filling out brackets and will continue filling them out. I doubt there’s much we can do about it, except embrace it. And if that means bruised egos for 95 percent of college basketball fans every year, well, we’ll just have to deal with it, I guess.

Seriously though, Butler? Not cool, man. Not cool.