The amount of sports I typically watch is fairly limited. While I know the rules well enough to sit through a game, I would never say that I know (or care, for that matter) which team has the good players or the potential to do well. It took me a solid 15 minutes to find ESPN.
Yet every year, March rolls around and things get real.
For those who are completely unaware, March Madness is the peak of college basketball season. Sixty-eight of the top-ranked teams are pitted together in a single-elimination bracket tournament to determine the year's ultimate champion. It's three straight weekends of nothing but high-stakes, high-tension basketball.
So why, then, do millions of non-enthusiasts like myself find themselves so immersed in the outcomes of these games and cursing our failed bracket selections? Quite simply because March Madness really has nothing to do with basketball. March Madness is all about the ego.
Think of your NCAA bracket as the equivalent of a sports SAT, if you will. There are a few who really know their stuff, those who have studied hard for the past year and memorized the stats and facts. However, there's also a whole other pool of people who just want to completely wing it and show that they can dominate without putting in any real effort.
Taylor Watson '16 admits he doesn't follow basketball at all, but has filled out brackets in the past just for kicks. He simply wanted to see whether he had the ability to guess correctly and show up his friends.
"It's satisfying, because then I know that my barely-informed guessing was better than their knowledge," Watson said.
It's true. We're all jerks who really just want to prove that we can achieve that elusive perfect bracket. Shreya Indukuri '16 admits that she's been chasing it for years.
"It's impossible to get, but my friends and I keep filling out brackets every March. It's become a tradition," Indukuri said.
Whether you're a die-hard basketball aficionado or my mother who can't remember which team she "voted" for, your odds of predicting the winners for every game are about the same. There are 4,294,967,296 potential brackets you can create, making anyone's chance at picking the right one a complete and total crapshoot. It may help a little bit to know who's playing well that year, but your odds are still infinitesimally small. You can select teams based on stats, mascots or the attractiveness of the players, but you're still in the same boat as everyone else.
Every year, I blindly follow the same strategy. I never pick a team with a geographical modifier in their name, or a school whose location I'd have to Google. Teams with poor color combinations (looking at you, Florida) are never allowed in the final four. If the teams are ranked close enough that an upset is probable, I chose the school I'd rather attend. And no matter what, Ohio State always wins it all.
March Madness is more than just a singular sports event it's a story. You get the opportunity to watch the mighty fall and the unexpected Cinderella team rise to victory. Whether you actually know anything, it's impossible to not get caught up in the enthusiasm and emotion.
"It's exciting to root for a team and deal with the possibility of upsets and surprises," McKenzie Bennett '13 said.
Bennett finds the college basketball tournament all the more exciting because of the players' extreme dedication.
"They actually love the sport, and they don't even know if they can make a career out of it. College players are so committed. NBA players don't put their whole heart into it because they know they're getting paid," Bennett said.
Even if basketball isn't your thing, March Madness spawns an atmosphere of competition that expands far beyond the sports world. MTV organizes a selection of bands to "battle it out for ultimate rock supremacy," giving fans a chance to push their favorites to the final rounds. Other options include TV sitcoms, cutest animals or hottest women. The Cooking Channel even created a tournament of the best college eats, featuring ice cream sandwiches, mozzarella sticks and French fry stuffed cheesesteaks (are you listening, DDS?). So if you can't bring yourself to get behind something so inherently sports-based, you can still get caught up in the narcissistic pleasure of proving yourself as an expert.
As I write this piece, I am still mourning Ohio State's loss from the night before. I have the Louisville-Duke game open in another tab and I am praying that Duke pulls through to give me my last shot at winning my pool. If anything, the tension provides a great distraction from any of the work I should actually be dealing with.
Especially here in Hanover, we need something to get excited about while the rest of world celebrates the return of spring. Instead of feeling sad that our legs haven't seen sunlight since September, we can let the NCAA Tournament get us through March and cross our fingers that we've transitioned into warmer, more pleasant April by the time it ends.
If you haven't jumped on the bracket bandwagon in time for this weekend's Final Four, consider it for next year. If you completely bomb, just say it was a fluke. But if you do well, you get to rub it in the faces of everyone you know for the next 12 months. And isn't that what all of us, sports fans and non-sports fans alike, are searching for in life anyways?
