It's a little easier writing this now than if I had written it Monday morning, when I was convinced I was the only person in America who guessed horribly wrong on the first weekend of the NCAA tournament. I'm finding out now that it was an epidemic. That's the new mission of this posting: to find out how many others were infected and how badly - and, yes, if anyone was as badly infected as me.

But first, I feel compelled to address an important development from last night.

TWENTY-NINE TURNOVERS?!?!?!?

Don't misunderstand this next observation, and please, I'm trying not to be condescending here. The Maryland women winning the national championship last year was a significant moment, and if there was a way to link to my column last April proclaiming so without you having to pay to read it, you'd see the proof. That team really seemed like the next evolution of the sport. The roster is deeper than I've ever seen a women's team, they're all multiskilled, they play together, they play smart, the athleticism has taken a quantum leap over the years, they're all likable, Brenda Frese has been a brilliant coach, they're all very accessible, everything you could want and root for. That being said, I think I did permanent damage to my vision watching that game last night, and it's going to be hard to watch a women's game again for a long time.

That was inexcusable. You can't, under any circumstances, explain away 29 turnovers by a defending national champ in a tournament game, with the possible exception that Kristi Toliver pulled a Gilbert Arenas/Kobe Bryant and said, "OK, you're gonna bench me? We'll just see how much you guys can get along without me.'' She was my favorite player on that team even before she shot the Terps into overtime with that three-pointer in the final last year, and last night, in the first half, she played as if she had a cast on both hands. Talk about contagious - the entire team couldn't even get the ball past midcourt most of the time, much less get off a shot, and spent three-quarters of the game backpedaling trying to stop Mississippi from sprinting to another layup or wide-open three. And, c'mon, Mississippi? OK, got that all out of my system.

One more thing: I'd like to personally apologize for defending the call against D.J. Strawberry at the end of the Butler game Saturday. I watched it a couple of hundred times over the weekend, after having written that it wasn't that bad a call - and it was that bad a call after all. At the time I saw it, directly in front of me across from the Maryland bench, it looked like a bang-bang play that could be interpreted the way the official did, and I wrote it that way. Of course, I'm not charged with getting it right the way the ref is, and he did, in fact, interpret it the wrong way, and in fact doesn't even appear to have been looking at the play when Strawberry caught the ball and landed. I said as much on my podcast with Terps radio color man Chris Knoche, and I'm saying it here, too.

Back to the original point.

My NCAA tournament picks stunk. I have only seven of my Sweet 16 left, and I'm still spraying air freshener around the nine teams I got wrong. It turns out there have been several public confessions of bad picks this week. Tony Kornheiser has said, on Pardon the Interruption and on his washingtonpost.com video spots, that he has only eight of his teams left. Gregg Doyel of cbssportsline.com admits to having picked Georgia Tech to reach the final 8, and Davidson and Stanford to reach the Sweet 16. Even Sports Illustrated's four-page spread of a bracket got four wrong, three going down in the first round.

And we all messed up for the same reason: George Mason. Everyone was trying to pick this year's Mason, and picking multiple random double-digit underdogs to make big runs to duplicate Mason's run. We all bought the mid-major, little-school-that-could, Cinderella hype, and it blew up in our faces this year when the results ran abnormally to form. In the process, everybody brushed off the chances of three high seeds that got overlooked all season: USC, UNLV and Butler. All seemed ripe to get bounced by someone seemingly better.

Still, no one set himself or herself up for more humiliation than me. My nine misses on the Sweet 16: Maryland, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth, Indiana, Texas, George Washington, Albany.

I'm taking the Fifth on this from now on. Or as Dave Chappelle would say, Fif.

So who did as bad, or worse? Either in quantity of quality of whiffs on the Sweet 16? And who has the courage to admit it in public here? Be honest. Don't just make up stuff to make some kind of point. Don't say, for instance, "I had Belmont and Jackson State playing in the championship game, because I'm a moron like you.'' If you've been ashamed for three days of the well-informed, well-thought-out predictions you made that went frighteningly off-track (imagine the feeling I had as I watched the Vanderbilt-GW score pile up), feel free to admit it here. You'll face no ridicule here.

We're all friends here in the garden of misery that will only be relieved by getting our pool money back for finishing last.

And by the fact that at least your team didn't commit 29 turnovers.