President Obama did an NCAA bracket for ESPN. A bad idea, really. No possible political gain can come from it. Because eventually he’s predicting 64 teams will lose, and there will be fans and players at all those schools who will wonder why the president didn’t have enough faith in them.

I imagine this is part of his “hey, look how hip I am” campaign (the Blackberry, the Jay Leno appearance), which is fine. But maybe not when it comes to something as rabidly followed as college basketball. Picking against 64 of 65 teams (everyone except North Carolina) … just seems a bad idea.

Anyway, he’s having a bit of a rough time, and the Pac-10 — including UCLA and USC — has a lot to do with it.

Obama picked against all six Pac-10 teams, in the first round, aside from Washington. Which he got right when the Huskies won.

Trouble is, four of the other five Pac-10 teams, the ones Obama picked against, won. And losing four slots out of the first round of your bracket because you didn’t believe in a particular conference … is probably fatal to winning any pool. Even if it’s just the White House beat correspondents.

Bill Simmons, espn.com’s infamous blogger from Boston, thought even less of the Pac-10 than did Obama, picking against all six Pac-10 teams — meaning he incurred five first-round defeats. He and some guy named “House” (Eddie, the Celtic? The fictional doctor?) put up a bracket,  and the Pac-10 will be their downfall.

USC, UCLA, Arizona, Arizona State and Washington all won. Two of those winners, UCLA and Arizona, were higher seeds in their games and Simmons/House still picked against them.

So, should we take from this that the Pac-10 is a monster conference?

No, I’m not ready to go there. Clearly the conference is better than we thought. But if we examine the five victories … it’s not like the Pac-10 is wiping the floor with the Big East or the Big Ten, generally considered to be the top conferences in the country.

The Pac-10 has zero games against them, so far.

The Pac-10 victories came over the ACC (USC 72, Boston College 55), the Atlantic 10 (Arizona State 66, Temple 57), the Colonial (UCLA 65, Virginia Commonwealth 64), the Mountain West (Arizona 84, Utah 71) and the SEC (Washington 71, Mississippi State 58).

(The defeat was against an ACC team; Maryland 84, Cal 71.)

In the next round, the five Pac-10 survivors have four games against the Big East and the Big Ten, and that could make for a high mortality rate. UCLA gets Villanova and Arizona State faces Syracuse; USC plays Michigan State and Washington gets Purdue. Only Arizona (Cleveland State, which upset Wake Forest of the ACC) gets someone from a “lesser” conference.

I would be surprised if more than one Pac-10 team is still alive, come Sunday night. Washington or Arizona, probably.

But for now, the Pacific’s conference is giving those Atlantic people a lot of grief. Or Obama and Simmons, anyway.