I was pretty fired up about college basketball a week ago, thanks to Ohio State’s win over Illinois, OU’s romp through the MAC tournament and the account of said romp from my friend in Cleveland — let’s call him Large — who witnessed it firsthand.

I was quickly brought back to earth by my performance in the various NCAA tournament pools I throw my money away on every year. Here’s a tasteless metaphor: My brackets aren’t in a Terri Schiavo situation, but Congress may take action to put them out of their misery.

Bracket One: Final Four picks (Oklahoma State, Louisville, Wisconsin and Utah) are still intact, but I lost a ton of early-round points when Syracuse and Pitt choked. LSU’s early exit didn’t help either. In my office’s pool, this sheet sits in the bottom third of the rankings so far. The Wife hasn’t given me any updates on the scores at her office, but I imagine my performance is similarly shameful there.

Bracket Two: Three of the Final Four picks (Illinois, Carolina and Dook) are still hanging on, but Gonzaga’s loss to Texas Tech was a killer. When did Bobby Knight start winning NCAA tournament games again? Georgia Tech’s beating at the hands of Rick Pitino’s Cardinals didn’t help much, and as noted above, the early gag by Pitt also hurt on this sheet. The point total is a little better than on the first sheet, but not by much.

And then there’s the Big One. Through a buddy of mine at work, I’ve been participating for several years in an interweb pool populated mostly by Maryland grads — $10 per entry, winner take all. $260 pot this year. It’s almost worth the price of admission to read the accompanying message board: lots of insults about cameo roles in gay porn videos and other fun stuff like that.

That fun aside, the basketball part hasn’t been nearly as entertaining, at least not for me. Syracuse was a Final Four pick, and they’ve been done for days. Wake Forest was another, but the hillbillies from Morgantown killed that option for me. Normally I like to see an underdog go deep into the tournament, but if Wisconsin-Milwaukee knocks out Illinois this week, I’m going to drive to Wisconsin to see about sinking the entire freaking city into Lake Michigan — they’ve done enough damage to my bracket as it is. How come Penn couldn’t do the same thing? Easy — I picked them to do so is why. Fuckers. And then there’s Pitt, Syracuse, Wake, Kansas, UConn, etcetera … Jesus, I’m not getting much help here.

Yahoo has a cool little application on its fantasy site that allows you to project points compared with the rest of the people in your pool. Using that, I know that if I lose no more games — and if Illinois beats UNC in the finals — I win. If anything else happens, I’m stuck near the bottom of the list — and nowhere near the money.

C’mon, Illinois — Uncle Crappy needs a new cell phone!