While waiting for our order to arrive at IHOP one morning, my wife, oldest son and I decided to make our picks for the 2007 NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Equipped with the tools of the trade --  a full sized, blank tournament bracket out of USA Today, a sheet with all the team's full schedules, and a black pen from the hotel we just stayed at -- we made our picks.

The scoring was simple: one point for all the first round games picked correctly, two points for the second round games, etc.

The prize for the winner? Bragging rights!

I took the pen first, and immediately started to fill out my brackets the way I always had before. I have been filling out brackets for at least 20 years and every year I go about filling out my brackets the same way. Here's how…

1. Using my "vast" knowledge of college basketball
Of course, there is much ego involved here. I use this method more times than not, which may account for the fact that I have never won a bracket pool or have never picked all four final four teams.

2. Team conferences / coaches
When there is a tough pick to make, I will often compare the conference each team is in and pick the team that came from the stronger conference. An example of this would be this year's first round match up between eighth-seed Arizona and ninth-seed Purdue. Thinking the Pac-10 was much stronger than the Big-10, I took Arizona… So much for this method!

3. Pick the upsets
I will always pick at least one 5th seed over a 12th seed, and sometimes I will pick two of these upsets. This year, I picked Long Beach State over Tennessee and Old Dominion over Butler. Alas, there were no 12-5/five upsets.

In fact, the only two upsets in the first round involved my two favorite teams, the Duke Blue Devils and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. Duke was defeated by Virginia Commonwealth and the Irish were upset by Winthrop. Although I really thought that Duke and Notre Dame were going to lose, I let what my heart was saying override what my brain was thinking… Your heart can lie after all.

4. Use the gut
I use the gut picks not only for my upset picks, but for other games that are tough to pick. For instance, my gut said Marquette over Michigan State and Texas Tech over Boston College. Gut, I wish you could just… SHUT UP!

I have been in many March Madness office pools and have never won any of them. I believe I was defeated by one of the most unique picking strategies ever: The random number generator.

How could a random number generator even come close to my tried and tried and tried again method of picking games? I don't know, but it did.

In 1989, when Michigan defeated Seton Hall for the national championship, I actually got second place in the pool. The winner picked his winners by using a random number generator on a calculator. The highest random number generated was the team he picked. I think he recently sold this calculator on EBay for a couple grand.

This past Monday, I am tallied up the points for our family bracket pool. My wife is mathematically eliminated, which is awesome since she can talk smack for a whole year and still have enough left to win Jim Rome's yearly smack off.

Ahead, by a long shot is my son Grant. Picking his first bracket ever, he picked all four final four teams correctly.

My chances of winning this pool are about as thin as Nicole Richie. Georgetown and Florida must advance to the finals with Georgetown winning the championship in order for me to win.

This year's tournament has lead me to change the way I go about filling out my brackets. First, I am adding a rabbit's foot to my tools of the trade, and second, hold on… Grant, dear son, what else should I change?