For the first time in seven years, the Iowa State men’s basketball team will not participate in the NCAA Tournament that begins this Thursday — and no, I’m not counting the First Four, because the tournament doesn’t begin until I can sit on my couch for 12 straight hours and watch basketball on three different screens — so if you’re an Iowa State fan, you’re probably not sure what to do this week.

Typically Iowa State fans would spend this week analyzing the bracket, reading predictions and expert opinions from all over the place, looking into tickets at whatever site the Cyclones are playing and generally being excited about what could happen in March. And for five of the last six years before this season, the Cyclones have won at least one game in the NCAA Tournament, so this is really unfamiliar territory.

But worry not. I’m here to tell you which teams, players and storylines you should be rooting for while the Cyclones take a break from March. Call it “A Guide To The NCAA Tournament For Cyclone Fans Even Though The Cyclones Didn’t Make The Tournament,” or AGTTNTFCFETTCDMTT for short. Here we go.

Before Thursday

Find some friends, coworkers, family members or even random strangers. Create a bracket pool. The winner needs some kind of prize. It doesn’t matter what the prize is, but you need a prize.

Also make sure to tweet about how bad the Selection Show was. It was really bad.

The most important thing to do before Thursday is to create a bracket — one single bracket — rather than a dozen brackets. If you have an ESPN account, you will probably notice ESPN allows up to 10 brackets. Fine, fill them all out, whatever. But before the tournament starts you need to have one solid bracket that is yours.

There’s nothing more annoying than the person who gets upset because they “had Creighton and Davidson winning, but other than that, my 14th bracket was perfect!” Nope, doesn’t count. I would suggest printing out a bracket and filling it in that way. Then you can circle or X-out winners and losers as the tournament progresses. That’s much more fun than refreshing ESPN to see if they’ve updated or not.

I’ve developed a short guide for filling out a bracket:

• Pick a ton of upsets. Iona over Duke? Definitely. Penn over Kansas? That’s as good as a lock. When one of your 13 upset picks hits on the money, you now have major bragging rights.
• Pretend to know what you’re talking about. Spew random facts about Tennessee’s non-conference schedule and how it prepared them for an Elite Eight run.
• Blindly trust KenPom, so when you miss a pick, you can talk about how advanced analytics don’t tell the whole story and there’s more to sports than numbers.
• When your bracket inevitably falls apart on day one, make sure everyone knows how you almost picked that one game different, and besides that you only missed two close games so your bracket is still basically perfect.

Thursday

Unless you’re going to be at a tournament site, you will need at least two TVs. Keep an eye on every 1 vs. 16 matchup, because if one of those is even remotely close, you’ll want to watch it. A 16 seed has never beaten a one seed, so you could be watching history.

Pick two games to watch, and watch them. This is the easy part. You can watch whichever games you want until that afternoon. Once 2:10 p.m. rolls around, however, you have plans.

If you remember the 2014-15 season when Iowa State won its second-straight Big 12 Tournament and grabbed a 3-seed (we won’t talk about what happened next), you’ll remember a backup point guard named Clayton Custer.

Custer played one season in Ames, appearing in 12 games and playing a total of 69 minutes in a Cyclone uniform. After his freshman season he transferred to Loyola.

This season, as a redshirt junior, Custer led the Ramblers to their first NCAA Tournament appearance in 32 years. Custer was named player of the year in the Missouri Valley after averaging 15.4 points and 4.3 assists per game in MVC competition.

Loyola grabbed an 11-seed and will play 6-seeded Miami on Thursday at 2:10 p.m. on TruTV. Watch that game. If Loyola wins, make sure to tell your friends you called the upset. If Miami wins, make sure to tell your friends you knew Loyola hadn’t played anybody all year and they weren’t ready for March.

Additionally, you’ll want to watch South Dakota State. Former Iowa State assistant coach TJ Otzelberger has made some noise in his two years as South Dakota State’s head coach.

Last year, the Jackrabbits made the Tournament as a 16-seed and lost by 20 to Gonzaga in the opening round. But this season, led by Summit League player of the year Mike Daum, South Dakota State grabbed a 12-seed and will play Ohio State at 3 p.m. on Thursday. That game will air on TNT.

Again, make sure to brag to your friends about how you called the upset as soon as you saw the bracket — if SDSU wins, of course. If Ohio State wins, tell them you knew South Dakota State was a one-man team that didn’t have a chance in the NCAA Tournament.

Make sure to watch Collin Sexton and Alabama at 8:20 p.m. Thursday as well. Sexton had Iowa State in his final 10 teams before committing to Alabama, so as an Iowa State fan, you can bring that up and say he was almost a Cyclone. Collin sounds a bit like Clone, too.

Friday

By now, 16 games have been played and 90 percent of brackets are totally wrecked. Throw yours out the window. You don’t have to worry about Iowa State losing to a 14- or 15-seed because they didn’t make it! Root for chaos!

Coach Steve Prohm’s former team, the Murray State Racers, are a 12-seed. They play at 3 p.m. against West Virginia. This is a win-win for Cyclone fans, because you can root for the Big 12 if West Virginia wins or you can root for Prohm’s old team to become the next Cinderella.

At 3:30 p.m., Texas and Nevada meet. Same thing. Hallice Cooke played one season in Ames before transferring to Nevada, and he’s playing a Big 12 team. These are win-wins because you can easily attribute any of Nevada’s successes to Cooke and therefore Iowa State, and if Texas wins you can say the Big 12 is a merciless gauntlet because the 7th-place team just advanced to the second round.

Additionally, if Texas loses you can point out the fact that their last win was over Iowa State. They were so tired from expending all their energy to beat the Cyclones that they couldn’t win another game all season. There are dozens of ways to spin this.

At 8:50 p.m., root for Michael Porter Jr. You couldn’t care less about Missouri, but Porter Jr. played two minutes against Iowa State earlier this year and scored two points. He missed most of the season with an injury but he did drop 12 points in his return in the SEC Tournament.

On the bright side for Iowa State, if this holds they can say they held Michael Porter Jr. to two points.

— Aaron Marner (@A_Mar32) November 11, 2017

As long as he scores more than two points in each of his NCAA Tournament games, you can brag about how Iowa State’s vigorous defense held Porter Jr. to his lowest scoring total of his college career. You can already boast about how Iowa State’s relentless pressure made him so tired that he didn’t score a single point over his next 29 games, but this would be the cherry on top.

Second round and beyond

By now, your bracket probably looks like Welch Ave. on a Sunday morning — desolate, bleak and in desperate need of something miraculous to clean it up.

If you haven’t already, burn your bracket. Find one or two Cinderella teams. If South Dakota State or Loyola are still alive, even better. Root for anybody but Duke. Wait until Virginia loses and tell your friends how you knew a team couldn’t win it all at such a slow pace. And get ready for next year, when you’re certain Iowa State will be the No. 1 overall seed for the 2019 NCAA Tournament.