March
11th – March 17th
-March Madness (March 15th): The NCAA’s postseason tournament for men’s basketball is consistently regarded as the most exciting sporting event year in and year out. Billions of dollars change hands in myriad types of betting pools and millions turn in to watch the games themselves. It takes three weeks for the whole thing to play itself out, though the contests are all single elimination. There is nothing else quite like it, and sports fans all over the country anticipate the commencement of the tournament like starving children at dinner time. But why is March Madness so much better than all the other sports’ postseasons? Why does the BCS catch so much flack, why did the MLB feel the need to add more wild card teams, why does the Super Bowl hardly ever live up to the hoopla surrounding it? There is nothing inherently better about basketball over other sports or college sports over professional sports, so how has the NCAA carved out the highly lucrative position of having the most exciting annual sporting event? The answer is simple: sheer volume. People watch sports with the same level of interest as they might a movie or TV show. As with those other forms of entertainment, the quality of the product determines our ability to get excited about it. Sports can range from being highly unpredictable to monotonously boring, and fans filter through the latter to seek out the former. No matter the sport or the ability levels of the people playing the sport, people want games that are fun to watch. When we can’t always rely on personal preference or hometown representation, we need riveting circumstances, unlikely occurrences, underdogs and overachievers, and a phantasmagoria of palpable drama. Consider the other professional postseason structures. For the MLB and NBA and NHL, there is a basic playoff structure, with the same teams battling it out over a series of games. The repetition of the teams playing the games can offer interesting strategic scenarios, but overall, fans have a hard time getting excited staring at the same thing for over a week straight, let alone the two month process of winding down these long playoff structures. The NFL has the natural advantage of being a sport violent enough as to eliminate the possibility of a series of games. Each contest must necessarily be a single elimination game, as by the end of a Best-of-Five series, most of the players would be in the hospital. But this means, even with 12 teams making the playoffs, the entire NFL postseason is decided in 11 games. This surely adds to the importance of each game, making the contests dramatic, but such a small amount of games, allowing for the unpredictability of how interesting the game will actually turn out to be, will probably only give fans two or three truly memorable viewing experiences. On the college level, only football gains the type of attention that basketball does, and its postseason is a month long odyssey of bowl games, each less interesting than the last. The BCS playoff structure is the most suspect of all. March Madness trumps all the others with statistical certainties. The NCAA allows a whopping 68 teams into their tournament bracket (which makes it laughable that some teams will inevitably feel snubbed every year. If you can’t assure a spot with 68 of them up for grabs, you have nothing to complain about). With that many teams, something cool will inevitably happen. The teams are seeded into the bracket seemingly at random, loosely arranged from best to worst, and then the games begin. On the first Thursday of the tournament of every year, ignoring those pointless play-in games, I always forget just how much of a melee it is. 16 games are decided in the first 12 hours, which means that 16 teams go home and 16 move on. Then there are 16 more games on Friday. Then 8 more on Saturday AND Sunday. In a scrambled four day period, the tournament field is whittled down to the sweet sixteen, which is further cut down to four in the subsequent weekend. Along the way, seniors give teary-eyed post-game interviews, Cinderellas find glass slippers, powerhouses get humbled by mid-major schools with one-tenth of their enrollment, buzzers get beaten, refs make outrageous calls, blossoming NBA stars find comfort on a national stage, and fans bemoan just how hard it is to predict anything that will happen in the NCAA tournament. It’s overwhelming, and riveting, and unique. Sitting in my man cave, with three flat screens, scrolling through the games, trying to keep up with my many brackets, leveraging my conflicting interest in each game, struggling to decide what I want to have happen most, the reason March Madness works is very simple to me: they throw enough shit at you that you can’t help but feel it all smells like roses.
-Upsets are
Contagious: On
Thursday, the games were rather uneventful.
For the first time in a long time, my brackets weren’t
already scratched
up with X’es, denoting yet another
mistake. But shit went sour on Friday,
with two 2
seeds falling to 15 seeds and half of the games being won by the lower
seed. As the games progressed later into
the day, I couldn’t escape the growing feeling that the upsets
were becoming
more and more likely. Each favorite
seemed shakier and shakier. By the time
Duke started their game late into the evening, I was sure that if the
game was close,
they would be in big trouble. It’s a
phenomenon I’ve noticed before, that my perception was aligned
with the
perception of the people I’m watching.
On Thursday, while the higher seeds rolled through the lower
seeds with
only a couple close calls (there were only two upsets all day), my
guess was
that the higher seeds would continue to win until a big upset caused a
spiral
effect. And I was right.
Friday’s afternoon games went mostly
according to plan, except for NC State beating