PJ Guippone

Since Loyola-Chicago took the floor last weekend, there has been an equal amount of camera time on the team and a woman who can not really stand on her own or even celebrate like a normal sports fan. Sister Jean has dominated headlines and tweets and SportsCenter and Barstool articles and seemingly every single one of my waking hours. Still, I am the only person in America that doesn’t appreciate her presence in my basketball life.

Regardless, Sister Jean supposedly made a bracket. This is funny to think about because my roommate is running a bracket for his family, and his grandmother, who is in a similar state of being on the planet for far too long, had Penn winning the national championship. With that knowledge, I expected Sister Jean to have Loyola winning the National Championship and then continuing her bracket to have Clayton Custer leading the Ramblers to a 6 game series victory over the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals.

But instead, this news broke before their game against Tennessee in the Round of 32.

Last week, I wrote about alternate ways to fill out your bracket. In case you didn’t pick up, the point of this article was to say don’t value your bracket too highly. Have fun watching the games and then if your bracket does well after that, then that is a fulfilling experience. But not everyone can do this. Another one of my roommates never fills out his bracket because he can’t separate the two things. He goes into Eeyore like depression and the entire tournament is ruined for him.

With this in mind, what kind of fan is Sister Jean? The first time the cameras pan to her (probably before tip), will she be conspicuously not wearing her scarf for the first time this tournament? Or will she be wearing a hoodie to be covering up the Nevada Wolfpack t shirt? Maybe her hair will be in braids similar to the Martin Twins.

It seems unrealistic, but I think there is a chance Sister Jean is fighting for the top spot of her bracket pool. If this is the case, the Ramblers might not even have the face of their program on their side. This would be Durant-like sports backstabbing. Who would Turner even show at that point? They can’t demonize this woman that has a remaining lifespan similar to that of a fruit fly. They also vaguely understand the joy of winning a bracket pool (at least I imagine they do. I do not).

So tonight when Sister Jean is rooting for Nevada, think about all the times you swooned over the team’s chaplain and remember that you fell for her sweet exterior like everyone else in the nation. I’ll be laughing at how the nation was duped and she’ll be laughing to the bank with her bracket winnings.