Understanding Sports Archives - Page 17 of 43

What is traveling in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is traveling in basketball? Can you explain the traveling rule? I know it has something to do with a player walking instead of dribbling but I don’t quite understand how it works.

Thanks,
Traci

Dear Traci,

Like you said, traveling is a rule in basketball that dictates how a player can move with the ball. A traveling violation is called when a player moves in an improper way. When this happens, a ref blows his or her whistle and the ball is given to the team that had been defending. Beyond this, I have to admit that I’m probably about as unclear as you are. Traveling has officially flummoxed me! It’s a strange feeling. Usually, when I get a question, I have a pretty good idea of how to answer it. Other times, I have to dig into the internet and do some research before I can come up with an answer. Even with the hardest questions, it’s rare for me to be stumped, even after reading up on a subject. Traveling is just one of those semi-unfathomable mysteries in life, like the nature of black holes or why breakfast is so satisfying when eaten at non-traditional times. Still, your question deserves an answer, so I’ll do my best.

From an overly simplified vantage point, traveling is easy to understand. Imagine teaching a child to play basketball. The first thing you establish would probably be the goal of the game — to get the ball through the basket in a top-down direction. Great! The kid gets it, grabs the ball, runs down the court and tries to score. “No, no” you might say, “you can’t just run with the ball, it’s not like football.” Then you’d explain the second most obvious rule in basketball — that you have to bounce the ball on the floor while moving with it. Traveling is the name given to a violation of this second rule. In principle, it’s simple. In reality, it’s complicated. I think the best way to delve into the complications is in the form of a question and answer session.

Q: Does it matter how many steps you take between bounces while you’re dribbling?
A: No! As long as you are dribbling, you can pretty much do whatever you want — you can take giant tall dribbles with lots of steps between bounces or tiny small ones.

Q: Can you start dribbling, stop, and then start again?
A: No! Once a player starts dribbling with the ball, she has to keep dribbling to keep moving. If she stops, another player on either team (or the rim) has to touch the ball before she can start dribbling again.

Q: Do you have to start dribbling right away, once you get the ball?
A: No! If a player gets the ball and comes to a stop (or maybe he was already standing still) without dribbling, he can stand still with the ball without dribbling. He can even move around a little as long as one foot remains still on the ground. This foot is called the “pivot foot.”

Q: What’s the deal with squirming around on the ground? I’ve seen that sometimes called traveling.
A: You’re right! If a player is on the ground, she may not “gain an advantage” by sliding while holding onto the ball.

Q: Okay, got it. This doesn’t seem so complicated. So, how many steps can a player take without dribbling?
A: Ah. There’s the rub. I don’t really know. The traditional, basketball-folk story has been that only two steps were allowed. In recent years though, particularly in the NBA (all our discussion today has been about NBA rules, although NCAA rules are not so different) this has obviously not been the case. Some of this is due to a culture of leniency when it comes to how referees enforce the traveling rules. Perhaps the league instructed them to err on the side of allowing play to continue undisturbed unless the traveling violation were particularly offensive. That’s possible. But it’s also true that the rule seems to almost intentionally obfuscate the issue. Instead of simply talking about steps, the rule uses the word “counts.” For example, “A player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may use a two-count rhythm in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” It then goes on, in great and almost incomprehensible detail to try to define what counts as a “count.” Some of the sub-definitions refer to the number of steps a player can take, some don’t. It’s almost as if the NBA wanted to make the traveling rule so complicated that fans (and maybe even players) would simply have to take the referees word as the truth.

Q: Hmm. So when you watch a basketball game, you really have no idea when traveling is going to be called?
A: No — that’s the funny thing. I generally do know when traveling is and isn’t going to be called. It’s as if, over the hundreds of hours I’ve spent watching basketball, I’ve developed an instinct for traveling as defined by NBA refs collective judgement. I know it when I see it (most of the time) but I can’t properly explain it. This is frustrating to me because it goes against my theory that with proper explanation, non-sports fans would be able to understand and enjoy sports much more than they do today.

Q: So what do I do now? How can I learn more about traveling?
A: Well, I guess the best thing to do is to understand the basic principles, which I hope this blog post has helped with, and then understand that even the most die-hard basketball fans probably don’t actually understand much more than that. Sometimes just knowing that other people don’t know either is all you need to know. You know? Armed with that understanding, you should feel free to watch lots of basketball and build your own sense of what should and shouldn’t be a travel. There are also lots of YouTube compilations of basketball plays which people think should have been called travels but weren’t. Here’s one good one.

Thanks for the questions,
Ezra

Does a baseball team have to use a DH or designated hitter in an American League game?

Dear Sports Fan,

Does a baseball team have to use a DH or designated hitter in an American League game? What if they have a pitcher who is really good at hitting?

Thanks,
Charlie

Dear Charlie,

No! And thanks so much for your question because I had no idea that this was true before I researched the topic to answer it. Any team that would prefer to have their pitcher bat is allowed to do that, but by doing so, they must decline the option to have a designated hitter for that entire game. For people who are not totally familiar with baseball, let’s do a little background before explaining this surprising freedom within the rules.

A designated hitter is a player who hits but does not play in the field. It’s one of the strangest rules in sports because it has such an important impact on the game and yet it is used in only half the Major League Baseball games each season. The American League plays with a designated hitter. The National League does not. It’s perhaps the most important quirk that stems from a history as independent leagues and not just two halves of the same league. So, in games between two National League teams, the pitchers take their turn hitting, just like the rest of their teammates. In games between two American League teams, the pitchers concentrate just on hitting and let a designated hitter take their spot in the batting order, once every nine times around. In interleague play or games with one National League and one American League team, where the game is played matters. The team at home gets to use their rules while the away team adapts.

The advantages of having using a DH are clear. Pitching is a very specialized skill. So is batting. If you are able to use two separate players to fill these specialized needs, you’re more likely to get high-quality performance in both realms. In the National League, where pitchers have to hit, they’re usually the worst hitters on the team. Having a pitcher at bat one out of every nine times a team gets to hit translates over the long run into a less high scoring and less highly skilled game. I have to say though, the DH rule has always bothered me a little. I feel like it’s somehow cheating to let players play only half the game — either just defense or just offense. Plus, I thought, it would really do a disservice to a player who was so abundantly talented that he could excel in both phases.

Your question prompted me to dig deeper into the rulebook and discover something wonderful. The DH is entirely voluntary! Teams don’t have to use a designated hitter. Before the game, they can simply declare that their pitcher is going to hit and then play the game that way. What a power move! I imagine a team doing this to send the message to their opponent, “we don’t need the silly DH rule. We can beat you without it!” In reality though, this almost never happens, and when it does, it’s sometimes an accident. For instance, in 2009, then Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon mistakenly listed two players as playing third base and in correcting the error, was forced to play the game without a DH.

Other times, teams make a substitution during the game that loses them their DH rights. This is easily understandable. Imagine a situation where the DH is the only other player on the team that can play a position — say catcher, since that’s a very unique position. Part of the way through the game, the starting catcher gets injured and so the player who was playing DH needs to step into that role. Once the DH plays in the field, his team loses DH privileges and has to use their pitcher as a hitter as well.

One thing a team cannot do (but which would be a nice trick if it were allowed) is to start a player in the DH spot who they never intend to have bat — for example, a starting pitcher who is on a rest day. That way, the first time the DH came up to bat, the team’s manager would be able to substitute for the perfect pinch hitter — a fast contact hitter in some situations or a hulking power hitter in others. This tactic was thought of and used by former Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver before being outlawed in 1980 by the so-called Phantom DH rule.

Whether by accident or on purpose, a team declining or losing their ability to use a designated hitter is one of those rare baseball oddities that makes the sport so rewarding to follow.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Why runs in basketball are a lie

During virtually every basketball game you watch, men’s or women’s, college or professional, at some point a little graphic seems to float up onto the screen and an announcer will note its content to reinforce it’s message. “The UC-Irvine Anteaters are on a 9-2 run in the last three minutes and 26 seconds,” the announcer will say. What this means is that in the last X time Team A has scored Y points while Team B has scored Z points and Z is always significantly less than Y. This is supposed to be surprising and impressive. “Wow” the viewer is meant to think, “Team A is really beating up on Team B in a significant way. Scoring Y points and only allowing Z points must mean that Team A is way better than Team B.” This conclusion is certainly true sometimes but not nearly as often as you’re meant to think.

I have a book on my shelves called How to Lie with Statistics. It’s a classic and one of its lessons applies to this situation. A great way to lie about statistics, and one that must be used every time one of these runs statistics pops up in a basketball game is selection bias. Selection bias is a great way of lying with statistics. Wikipedia defines it as:

Selection bias refers to the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis such that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.

In this case, the way that the selection is biased is in its starting point. It’s end point is always the current moment of the basketball game. That’s an essential element of the con — “In the last X minutes…” The starting point is not random though, it’s carefully chosen. I guarantee that the second before the television station chooses to start the period, Team B (the one that seems to be losing terribly) scored a basket. Otherwise, why not extend the period further back? The longer it is, the more impressive it is.

If we assume that Team B scored right before the run started, than every time we see or hear about a run, we should add two (or three) points to Team B’s score. A 9-2 run becomes a 9-4 (or 5) run in our heads. A 7-0 run would more fairly be seen as a 7-2 (or 3) run. The reason why I say to add two or three points is the source of another form of trickery. Single points can be scored in basketball but by far the more common forms of scoring involve either two or three points being scored at once. That means a 9-2 run probably only involves four scores on the part of the team with 9 and one from the team with 2. (There’s lots of other ways this could happen, but this is the most likely. A 4-1 run seems less unlikely and therefore significant than 9-2. Basketball’s scoring system makes runs seem more crazy than they actually are.

The other piece of selection bias is this: the television station only points out a run when it happens. I know, that sounds utterly stupid, but it’s true. We don’t notice when the last 11 points have been split relatively evenly between two teams because no one points out that this has just happened.

I suspect that even if basketball were totally random — by which I mean that you could replace the basketball game in this scenario with someone flipping a coin a couple hundred times and marking down every Heads as a score for Team A and every Tails as a score for Team B — that you would expect to see runs worth noting by a commentator in almost every game. After all, a basketball game has around 140 possessions in college and around 190 in the NBA. If you think of it as 140 or 190 coin flips in a row, doesn’t it seem pretty likely that we’d see at least one run of four or five or six or even seven Heads with only one or two Tails mixed in?

I’m quite sure that there’s a mathematician out there who can help with the statistics in our coin flipping game. How likely are what types of runs in a game of 140-190 coin flips? If we can find that mathematician and pair her with a basketball statistics junkie who can find out what runs show up how often in real games, then we’ll be able to figure out whether the runs in basketball are actually notable or simply sleight of hand used by television producers to keep us glued to our seats. My money is on the magic trick.

— — —

Note 1: I use this trick all the time on this blog. I know it’s deceptive, but it is how most sports fans think about games — “this is an important game for my team because they’ve lost six of the last seven (of 82 or 162) regular season games. They need to break the streak!” I even think about games that way when it’s my favorite team involved. Sports fandom is not always or even often rational.

Note 2: The simple way to fix this would be to think about scoring in terms of arbitrary splits — what has the score differential been in the last two minutes or four minutes? This gets rid of one form of selection bias — the starting point — but it would still be vulnerable to the other kind of selection bias where commentator only note the split when it seems unusual.

When is assault, assault in ice hockey?

There’s an old joke, usually attributed to Rodney Dangerfield, about hockey that goes, “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” At the risk of trying to explain humor, this joke works because it flips what would be a more reasonable comment, “I went to a hockey game the other night, and a fight broke out.” In reversing the statement, the joke identifies a hidden truth about how many people watch hockey — the violence is the primary attraction and the sport, secondary. The juxtaposition of two news stories today from Yahoo!’s hockey blog, Puck Daddy, made me think about the joke in another way.

The first of the back to back stories was a story by Greg Wyshynski about an NHL player whose choice to play with a tinted visor on his helmet following a concussion casts doubts on whether he truly recovered. Wyshynski suggests that the player, Matt Calvert, played through concussion symptoms earlier in the year before being held out for fifteen games. Now that he has apparently recovered, he’s returning with a tinted visor because he is still sensitive to light. Now, it’s not impossible that his light sensitivity is unrelated to the concussion or that it’s not a sign that he hasn’t truly recovered enough to be playing, but it sure is suspicious. The second story, published eight minutes later by Sean Leahy, comes from Sweden, where a 31 year old hockey player named Andre Deveaux has had an arrest warrant for an assault charge issued following something which happened before a Swedish club hockey game. Deveaux felt he had been dangerously attacked by an opposing player in a previous game and decided to take his revenge during pre-game warm-ups. In video you can see Deveaux skating up behind an opponent, swinging his stick at the player’s feet, and then wrestling him to the ground. When asked about it afterwards, Deveaux protested that his actions were not as bad as his opponents, because he felt the hit he took was more dangerous (and indeed, he claims to have had concussions symptoms since that hit, although he still played) than the attack he perpetrated.

The connection between these two stories may not be obvious but I do think it’s significant. Both stories are about grappling with violence in the context of hockey. Hockey has a complex set of written and unwritten rules that determine which forms of violence are acceptable. The outside world does as well, both in the form of laws and cultural norms. When we criticize a sport for allowing a concussed player to return too soon after a concussion, we’re basing that view on our ever-changing set of cultural norms. When we issue an arrest warrant for a player for assaulting another player, we’re basing that on both laws and cultural norms.

In the first article, we never find out much about the hit that caused Matt Calvert’s concussion, but we don’t really need to. Like in American Football, the collisions that are integral to hockey are more than enough to plausibly and perhaps inevitably cause brain injuries among a good percentage of its players. That Calvert got a concussion playing hockey is understood — what’s at question is how he and his team and the league should be handling his diagnosis, recovery, and return to play. In the second article, the details of the incident are important. It’s rare but not unprecedented for a warrant to be issued from an incident on a hockey rink. Of course, hockey players assume a certain amount of violence when they step on the rink. Lots of what happens on a hockey rink would be fairly considered assault of the rink. What differentiates Deveaux’s assault from a normal body-check is primarily the rules, written and unwritten, of hockey itself.

“I went to a hockey game the other night and a conversation about cultural acceptance of violence broke out.” Is, perhaps, less of a good joke, but in this case, it’s probably more true to life.

How March Madness and the NFL have switched places

Once upon a time — not so long ago — sports fans watched professional football and college basketball on television. That may not sound so different from today, but before the internet took over the world the way we were presented with these two sports was just a little bit different.

In the past, if you wanted to watch March Madness, you tuned your television to CBS. There it would stay, from around noon on the first Thursday of the NCAA Tournament until whenever the nets got cut down in celebration… or you ran out of beer… or had to eat. There was no channel hopping. All the games were on CBS, even if not all the games were televised since many of them overlap in time. The people who ran CBS would pick what they thought the best game would be and go with that. As the day went on, they reserved the right to switch from one game to another if the other was more exciting. As games neared their end, sometimes simultaneously, this resulted in a frantic back-and-forth telecast, that at its best was more exciting than watching a single game. Certainly part of what made March Madness so great — and specifically the first round of March Madness with its 32 games in 48 hours so great — was its overlapping, buzzer-beater-every-fifteen-minutes, relentless nature.

If you wanted to watch professional football, you had lots of options each Sunday during the fall, but they were heavily constrained by where you lived. Over the years, games were televised on every major broadcast network, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, plus cable channels like TNT and ESPN. Games were on at 1 p.m. ET and 4:30 p.m. ET every Sunday — usually about seven games at the earlier time and three or four in the later time-slot. The thing was, you only got access to one or sometimes two games at a time. No matter how bad the local team (and if you didn’t have a local team, you were assigned one) was, when they played that was the only game you could watch. When the local team was idle, the networks decided what game you had access to based on what they thought of the game and your geography.

Then, in 2009, everything changed for football viewers. The NFL launched a new cable channel called the NFL RedZone. From 1 p.m. ET to whenever the last 4:30 p.m. ET game ended, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m. ET, the RedZone would show football, all the football, and nothing but the football. With one brilliant studio host, the RedZone captivated its audience, by steering them from game to game based on how exciting the game was; making sure they saw every score and almost every meaningful play. Watching the RedZone was an amazing experience and despite its ability to leave your brain spinning and your eyes aching, it was and still is incredibly popular. It changed the way people watch football. No more were they trapped watching a boring local game — no more were they even trapped watching a single game. The RedZone captured the exhilaration of those few frantic minutes of buzzer beaters in a March Madness broadcast and translated it to football viewers every Sunday.

Meanwhile, things were also changing in the world of college basketball. One of the tricky elements of March Madness for sports fans had always been how to watch the first round, given that much of it happened between noon and the end of work on a Thursday and Friday. In many offices, this meant widespread breakouts of bronchitis or ludicrously long lunch meetings. At some point though, some brilliant person at CBS realized that what most people have at work was not a television but a computer. CBS started streaming the games over the internet. Aside from the fact that early on, most places didn’t have the bandwidth to handle the sudden influx of people trying to stream video, the shift to internet created one vital difference in how people consumed March Madness: the curated channel experience that jumped the viewer from game to game was gone. In its place was a simple interface for you to choose which game you wanted to watch. Watching a blow-out? Want to check in on the other game? It was only a click (and usually the required viewing of an advertisement) away.

Within a couple years of this innovation, CBS made a similar shift in its television coverage. In 2010, CBS was forced to renegotiate their agreement with the NCAA to cover March Madness and as part of that negotiation, they agreed to share the rights with Turner Broadcasting System. Instead of using one channel to cover multiple games, they now used multiple channels simultaneously. When games overlapped, they were simply televised on different channels: CBS and TNT, TBS, or TruTV. The television experience now mimicked the online experience. The games were all available but you had to manage your experience by flipping from one game to another yourself.

These parallel evolutions in how professional football and the NCAA Basketball Tournament are presented to viewers each have their benefits and their disadvantages. Critics of the RedZone channel would say that the pace and narrative consistency of watching one football game at a time has been lost; that people no longer care about what team wins, just about individual plays and players. Proponents of the RedZone may point out that old-fashioned game-based television is still as available as it ever was and that the RedZone allows people to watch teams they could never (or less frequently) have seen in the past. Proponents of the multi-channel approach to March Madness will argue for its obvious superiority by saying that it has made every minute of every game available to viewers who otherwise would not have had a say in what they were watching; that it has democratized the viewing of college basketball. Critics of the multi-channel reality may argue that availability without curation simply cannot create the gasp-inducing thrill of the old way; that having to manage your own viewing experience in this way is like going to a restaurant and being forced to choose the ingredients for your dish instead of relying on the expertise of a chef.

What all sides should be able to agree on is that it’s curious how technology and time have popularized a curated experience in football while simultaneously eradicating a similar experience in college basketball. The moral of the story is that progress rarely moves in a straight line but usually twists and turns and doubles back on itself. What’s old is new and what’s new is old more frequently than not.

The End… for now.

What happened to Jeremy Lin?

Dear Sports Fan,

What happened to our incredible Jeremy Lin? What is he up to these days?

Thanks,
Jeehae

Dear Jeehae,

Jeremy Lin is still chugging along, playing basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA), currently with the Los Angeles Lakers. He’s a solid NBA player but has never regained the spectacular play that made him a cultural phenomenon in 2012 when he played with the New York Knicks. Those crazy days of stardom which came to be known as “Linsanity” are now just a memory to be treasured or deconstructed.

For those of us who don’t remember or who never really knew what Linsanity was all about, here’s a short recap. At the start of 2012, Jeremy Lin was one of the dozens of people hovering around the fringes of NBA teams, good enough to have been signed by a team but not quite good enough to be a regular member of that team. Lin played his college basketball at Harvard where he played for four years and grew as a player each year. In his senior season, Lin was voted unanimously to the All-Ivy League First Team and received several other college honors as well. All-Ivy League First team is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into having a professional career. The Ivy League is a much weaker conference than the conferences most prospective NBA players play in. Indeed, Lin was not drafted by any of the 30 teams in the 2010 NBA draft but, after a decent showing in the NBA’s summer league, he was signed to a two-year contract by the Golden State Warriors. This seemed like a great fin. The Warriors were Lin’s favorite team, having grown up nearby, and as the first Chinese or Taiwanese-American player in the NBA, Lin was disproportionately popular for an unheralded rookie, especially among the Warriors already large Asian-American fan base. After one year with the Warriors, Lin was waived or released from the team. This isn’t unusual for a player of his stature in the league, and Lin wouldn’t have to wait long for a second and third chance. The first team to pick him up was the Houston Rockets but Lin could not break through the three more established players that team already had at his position. The Rockets cut him as well. After several weeks without a team, the New York Knicks claimed Lin.

Even though the New York Knicks signed Lin, he was no sure thing to succeed there, or even to play. He needed a little bit of luck just to get onto the court. He found that luck in January, after a particularly bad game from the Knicks starters prompted then Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni to turn to Lin in desperation (and perhaps to instill some competitive fear in the rest of the team.) Lin took off. For a couple weeks, it seemed like he could do no wrong on the basketball court. He set records for performance in his first handful of starts. He averaged over 20 points and seven assists in his first five games and made a couple memorable buzzer beaters. Lin got famous in a hurry. After the season was over, the Knicks were expected to give a long term contract to their new most popular player. It wasn’t meant to be. Lin was a restricted free agent, which means other teams were able to make contract offers to him, but the Knicks could match their offers and keep Lin if they wanted. The Houston Rockets, perhaps feeling regret over having had Lin on their team and then releasing him, made Lin an offer he couldn’t refuse and the Knicks couldn’t match. All of a sudden, Lin was a Rocket and Linsanity in New York was just a memory.

Since then, the Knicks have never recaptured the city or the world’s attention the way they had it when Lin was a thing, nor have they been very successful as a basketball team. Lin too has never been as good as he was in those first days in New York. He struggled for two seasons in Houston before being traded to Los Angeles in a move that was more about Houston releasing themselves from the financial obligation of paying him than it was about basketball. In Los Angeles this year, Lin has been a part of one of the worst teams in the league. Still, he’s in the NBA and shows no signs of leaving, which is actually more of an achievement than you might think. The NBA is an amazingly shallow league — there simply aren’t that many jobs for basketball players and each year between 30 and 60 new, young, players come out of college or Europe to compete for jobs. Lin should be proud of simply staying in the league.

How should we evaluate Linsanity with the benefit of hindsight? It was truly a remarkable performance from a relatively unknown player but the phenomenon of Linsanity was also aided by two important factors: Lin’s unique backstory as the first Asian-American NBA player and the fact that he was playing for the New York Knicks, a marquee franchise because of its history and location. Streaks of impressive play by newcomers do happen. Any player who is skilled enough to make the NBA is skilled enough to put together a string of seemingly unlikely statistical performances but they don’t always become cultural stars. A good comparison is the case of Hasaan Whiteside. Whiteside was almost a complete unknown before this year. He had played college basketball at Marshall University in West Virginia and, unlike Lin, was actually drafted by an NBA team. Before long though, he was out of the league and played in the NBA Development League, Lebanon, and China, before being welcomed back into the NBA by the Miami Heat. When he broke into their lineup this January, he quickly became a basketball revelation of similar proportions to Lin. Whiteside is an athletic seven-foot tall player who puts up remarkable scoring, rebounding, and blocking statistics. As famous as he rapidly became in basketball circles, he never broke out of the sports section and onto the news pages. Whiteside is not notable from a personal interest or historical standpoint and Miami, without LeBron James to make them notorious, is not as interesting a team as the New York Knicks are (even when they’re terrible.)

Linsanity was a special time and Lin is a good NBA player but he’ll probably never be as good again as he was in his first games with the Knicks.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Why it's okay to love March Madness and hate it too

March Madness, the annual NCAA Men’s College Basketball tournament begins today. It’s a remarkably popular event. The tournament storms through the sports world, eclipsing nearly everything else for its duration, and makes significant inroads into the normal, non-sports fabric of the United States. If you go into a sports area in the physical world, like a sports bar or your office’s water cooler, or in the virtual world, like the sports-only social network Fancred, you’ll hear a lot of people saying the same thing: “The first four days of March Madness are my favorite days of the year.” On the other hand, if you roam into some non-sports areas, like a folk dance or an intelligently satirical television show, you’ll hear sentiments that range from the casually uninterested to confusion about why so many people are so excited about the tournament to righteous indignation about March Madnesses exploitative nature. As with so many differences in life, there is truth on both sides. Let’s try to bridge that gap by running through the arguments on both sides, starting first with the hate and moving to the love. If you’ve never understood how anyone could hate March Madness or how seemingly everyone could love it, keep reading.

March Madness is big business. The last time the television rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament came up for bidding was 2010. CBS and Turner Sports agreed to pay close to $11 billion dollars to the NCAA for the right to broadcast the games for the next 14 years. It’s safe to assume that CBS and Turner both plan on making a profit from their investment. The NCAA, despite being officially a non-profit, certainly makes a profit in the way that most people think about profit. Their president, Mark Emmert, took a $1.7 million dollar salary in 2011. His job, as vital as it may be to facilitating the organization of basketball games, is not what generates all of this money. What generates the money, is basketball, and the people who play that basketball, the so-called “student-athletes,” don’t receive a salary at all.

HBO’s extremely good Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a wonderful job with this topic in last week’s show. If you’re new to the subject or just want a wonderful refresher course, I suggest you watch it now.

If you’re a sports fan, Oliver’s argument is so old-hat that it’s hard for it to generate any real passion any more. But that’s kind of the point. It’s good to be reminded that the NCAA’s case for continuing not to pay their labor force is almost as twisted and circular as Groucho Marx’s in the 1929 film, The Cocoanuts.

The NCAA essentially says, “We can’t pay you, you’re amateurs.” After asking his workers if they want to be wage slaves and receiving a “no”, Groucho says, “Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Remember, there’s nothing like Liberty — except Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Be free, my friends. One for all, and all for me, and me for you, and three for five and six for a quarter.” Both Groucho and the NCAA are so brazenly absurd that they [seem to, at least for a while] get away with it.

My only issue with Oliver’s coverage is that he doesn’t offer a solution, which inadvertently puts him level with the protagonist in a heavily censored version of the Nelly song, Hot in Herre, who he made fun of earlier in the episode, saying, “Now it’s just a man complaining about the heat and offering no solution whatsoever.” There is a solution out there, there has to be, but for now it is enough to simply identify the problem and agree that it needs to be fixed.

While the underlying hypocrisy and exploitation inherent in March Madness rankles, there are some really great reasons to both enjoy and cherish the tournament. One of the primary reasons to love the tournament is its sloppy but undeniably democratic nature. Compared to virtually every other American sporting event, March Madness in unique in its combination of the highest quality play with the most inclusive format. College basketball is enormous. There are 347 Division 1 college basketball teams. Each of these teams plays in one of 32 conferences. Each of these conferences crowns a champion at the end of the year and every single one of these champions is given automatic qualification into March Madness. It’s true that the majority of the other 36 places are given to teams in one of the top four or five power conferences, but the nature of the tournament is still extremely inclusive. This is also what makes the tournament so exciting. No where else (in American sports at least, this kind of thing is much more common in European club soccer) do you get to see and root for such extreme underdogs.

In the past week, two wonderful pieces of journalism, one video, one narrative and written, were released. If you want to get a deeper understanding of how the NCAA tournament came to be so inclusive (and how it almost wasn’t) and just what being able to compete with the biggest schools means to people in the smallest basketball towns, I cannot recommend these two pieces highly enough. From Grantland and director Nick Guthe comes a short film called The Billion Dollar Game. The 13 minute video tells the story of how a single, almost-upset of a number 1 seeded Georgetown team by number 16 seeded Princeton (not normally an underdog in anything, but in men’s college basketball, they certainly are) in 1989 was such a powerful example of the potential for drama inherent in asymmetric sport that it convinced the NCAA and their television partners to maintain the democratic nature of the tournament. Justin Pahl’s piece on SB Nation, Countdown to March: Life and Death with a Small Town Team is just an incredible article. It’s more a short memoir than a long article, really. Pahl grew up in the small, midwestern city of Valparaiso, Indiana. His father was a professor at Valparaiso University and they shared a love that bordered on obsession for the school’s basketball team. Pahl mixes the story of what happened to that team and to the older kids in his town whose athletic feats he grew up idolizing with the story of his own coming of age in a beautiful way. Reading this article will give you a profound understanding of the conflicting urges of small-town America: pride, desires to stay and to leave, inferiority complexes, love. When I see a small-town team from an lesser known conference keep pace with one of the big boys in this year’s tournament, I’ll think of Princeton’s Billion Dollar Game and Valpairaiso’s Countdown to March and pull for them just a little bit harder than normal.

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Copy

March Madness, the NCAA college basketball tournament, is one of the most highly anticipated sporting events of the year. Aside from furtively watching games on laptops, tablets, or phones during work, the most common way that people interact with the tournament is through the filling out of March Madness Brackets. Doing a bracket is a form of gambling. Before the tournament begins, a bunch of people get together and (usually using some web software) each predict what they think is going to happen in each of the 67 games during the tournament. Rules vary a little from one platform to another and one group to another, but generally you get points for correctly predicting the winner of a game and those points increase as the tournament goes on. For instance, you might get one point for predicting a game during the first round of the tournament but twenty points for getting the winner of a Final Four or semifinal game right. By and large, brackets are a fun way to get involved with the tournament. It keeps you interested in what’s happening and usually it’s not for enough money to be a problem if you lose.

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. So far we’ve covered chalk, telling a story, and the frivolous approach. Now we’ll take a look at filling out a bracket in the way that gives you the best chance of winning — by letting someone else do the work.

Unless you’re a college basketball nut, you probably haven’t even seen most of the 64 March Madness teams play. Actually, even if you’re a college basketball nut, you probably haven’t seen most of them play. Unless you’re a statistics student or an economics professor, you probably can’t build a model that predicts the outcome of college basketball games. Even if you can create a model, how much better do you think it will be than Dan picking games pretty much at random? Not much better, is the answer. Lucky for us, there are people out there that spend their entire lives watching college basketball or crunching the data produced by college basketball. Why not simply borrow from one of them to fill out your bracket?

Open up Ken Pomeroy’s 2015 College Basketball Rankings or Ed Feng’s The Power Rank or Jeff Sagarin’s Pure Points Predictor. Take a look at their rankings and see which one you prefer. Keep it open in one tab and your bracket in another. Run through the games and choose a winner based on Pomeroy, Feng, or Sagarin regardless of the seeds. Keep it up all the way through the tournament with one possible exception. This year the overwhelming favorite is Kentucky. The Kentucky team is undefeated and first in all three of these rankings. You have to decide what you want to do about that. Because of the way brackets work, choosing Kentucky to win will put you in with the majority of the people you’re competing against. If you do this, you’re relying on getting more of the other games right than anyone else. The alternative is to pick another team to win the whole thing. If you do this and they win, you’ll have a much smaller pool of people who have also taken that team. Normally, I would say to avoid the overall favorite but Kentucky is such an overwhelming favorite (although Nate Silver still says they only have a 40% chance of winning) that I can’t fault you for wanting to take them.

Here’s the cool thing about relying on someone else’s rankings. By doing this, you’ll inevitably create a bracket that’s a good mixture of mostly favorites and some reasonable under-dogs. The NCAA selection committee that creates the 1-16 seedings for the teams in the tournament and because those numbers are right on the brackets, most people simply go with them. They see a #3 and assume that that team is necessarily better than a #6. That’s not necessarily the case. Using a different ranking gives you a built in opportunity to go against the grain while still choosing a team that an expert thinks should win. For example, all three of our rankings options have Utah, a five seed, significantly higher than one would expect from its seeding. That certainly suggests that they’d be a good upset to pick over fourth ranked Georgetown, and it wouldn’t be a shock to see them advance over Duke. Another team all three models agree on is Maryland. Maryland is a four seed in the tournament, but all three of the models rank them as weaker than that — one as the 25th best team and two as the 33rd best team.

Of course, none of this might matter. Your friend who picks chalk might finally have her day in the sun or your brother who always picks based on color may be celebrating at the end of the tournament, but this method combines the best chance of winning with the biggest chance of being able to thump your chest and say “I had that” after correctly picking an upset. I’m going to fill in a bracket this way now!

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Frivolous

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. So far we’ve covered chalk and telling a story. Now we’ll take a look at filling out a bracket in a completely frivolous way.

Here’s the thing about March Madness brackets. They are essentially random. Everyone has been in a bracket pool that ends up being won by someone who didn’t watch a single college basketball game all year and who chose teams based on something insane like proximity to Maryland or how many consonants their team nickname contains. This absolutely infuriates people who think of themselves as knowledgeable about college basketball AND who think that their knowledge should give them an edge over people who don’t take the bracket seriously. This year, why not be the person who doesn’t take it seriously — that way if you somehow end up with the best bracket, you not only win but you also drive your friends, family, or colleagues crazy. Here are a few ideas for guiding principles to a totally frivolous March Madness bracket.

Team Colors

What could be more ridiculous than choosing winners based on color? The thing is, choose the right color, and it’s just as likely to win as not. The best two colors to run with this year are blue and red. Blue is the overwhelming favorite with three of the top four seeds, Kentucky, Villanova, and Duke wearing blue. Red will get you the other one seed, Wisconsin as well as at least one two seed, Arizona. There simply aren’t enough of the other colors out there to make them a reasonable choice. Although it would be fun to do a bracket where you give preference to any color other than blue or red. I doubt that one would be successful, but it would, at least, be unique!

Team Names

Team names are always fun to think about. I enjoy dividing the field up into categories and then choosing one or two to run with. This year’s favorite would definitely be cats, with three of the top ten teams Kentucky, Villanova, and Arizona all sharing the name of “Wildcats”. Other cat names in the field are the Northern Iowa Panthers, the Davidson Wildcats, the BYU Cougers, the Cincinattie Bearcats, the LSU Tigers, the Georgia State Panthers, the Lafayette Leopards, and the Texas Souther Tigers. Other popular categories of animals are dogs and birds. You could also probably build a good bracket by having just the non-cat/dog teams win. In this case your champion team could be the UC Irvine Anteaters, by far the best animal mascot in the tournament! Leaving the animal universe, you’ve got some historic names like the Robert Morris Colonials, Xavier Musketeers, and the Virginia Cavaliers, there are even a couple of meteorological forces like the St. John’s Red Storm and Iowa State Cyclones. Choose one category or a combination of categories and run with it.

Public vs. Private

We all have our biases when it comes to education. Did you go to a private school or a public school for high school? Still paying off a slew of loans from choosing a small liberal arts college or did you go to your state school? There’s plenty of both in this tournament, so why not use school type as your guide to picking wins? Up at the top of the bracket, going private will get you Duke, Villanova, and Gonzaga. Going public will leave you with Kentucky, Wisconsin, Kansas, Virginia, and Arizona. Good luck! As a tie-breaker, you could always use size of school. Go small for private and big for public when both the schools in a game are on one side.

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Tell a Story

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. So far we’ve covered chalk. Now we’ll take a look at filling out a bracket by telling a story.

During the lead-up into this year’s Super Bowl (stick with me, this will make sense) I listened to Grantland’s NFL Podcast featuring two writers from the website, Bill Barnwell and Robert Mays. One of their podcasts covered some of the many prop (or proposition) bets that you could make before the big game. These are bets about various things that may happen during the game, like will a particular wide receiver catch more than seven passes or will a quarterback throw more than three touchdown passes or who the game’s Most Valuable Player will be. I’ve enjoyed making bets like this (never for real money though, only for fun) in the past but I’d always thought of each bet as an isolated question. Mays and Barnwell suggested that the best way of making prop bets is to tell a story about what you think is going to happen in the game and then follow it through. If you think one team is going to win by running the ball a lot then maybe you should pick that team’s running back to be the MVP and bet on a lower score since games with a lot of running are usually lower scoring. This idea of telling a story made a lot of sense to me and it can be applied equally well to filling out a March Madness bracket. Think about the tournament as a single entity instead of a group of individual games and then tell a story about it that makes sense to you. Pick the games based on that story. Here are a few suggestions of stories that you might think about telling.

Tell a story about height

If you’ve ever played basketball, even in gym class, you know it’s helpful to be tall. One story you could easily tell about this year’s tournament is that it will be a triumph of height over everything else. This is particularly easy to imagine because the best overall team in the country, the undefeated Kentucky Wildcats, is unusually tall. In addition to Kentucky, other very tall teams are Maryland, Wisconsin, Iowa, and UC-Irvine.

Tell a story about age

Each year, many of the best players in college basketball are freshman in college. This is because the NBA, the best professional option for basketball players, does not allow its teams to hire players until a year after they graduate from college. Most of the best players in the United States decide to do one year of college and then enter the NBA draft. Teams like Kentucky, Duke, and Kansas, all among the favorites to win the NCAA Tournament, are also among the youngest teams in the country. You can go either way on this one — tell a story about older teams showing the young punks what basketball is all about and take Gonzaga, Wisconsin, or Villanova to win it all. Or go with talent over experience and choose Kentucky, Kansas, or Duke. Use the handy charts on Stat Sheet as your guide.

Tell a story about conferences

One of the fun things about college basketball is that many of the teams playing each other during March Madness will have never played each other before, at least not this year. There are so many college basketball teams and most of the time during the regular season, teams play other teams within their conference. In order to rank teams from 1-16 in each of the four regions, the selection committee has to make a bunch of assumptions about the relative strength of each conference. Sometimes, they get it wrong. If you think a conference was better than the selection committee thought it was, err on the side of choosing those teams to win games. This year, the Big 12 and Big Ten each got seven teams into the tournament followed by the ACC and Big East with six each, and then the SEC with five and PAC-12 with four. Choose one of those conferences to hate on. Choose another to celebrate. Guide your choices based on conference biases and you’ll create an interesting bracket.

Tell a story about getting hot

Last year, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team won March Madness as a seven seed, the first time a seven seed had ever won the championship. What happened? They got hot at the right time and were able to take the momentum they built during a run to the AAC conference championship final and build on it through the early rounds of the NCAA tournament. By the time they got to the final four, they were an unstoppable force firing on all cylinders. Now, there’s all sorts of articles out there debunking the idea that momentum in sports exists during a single game, much less across a multi-week tournament. That said, you could do worse than to look at which teams won or were runners-up of their conference tournaments, especially in the top five or six conferences. Pick teams that have shown recently that they know how to play under pressure.

Tell a story about pace

Pace is a statistic that expresses the number of possessions a team has during a game. It’s reflective of their style of play. College basketball, because it has a longer shot clock than the NBA (35 seconds rather than 24) has a much more varied pace landscape than professional basketball. Even at the very top of the tournament, among the one and two seeds, there’s a wide variety. Wisconsin and Virginia are two of the slowest teams in the country. They win by playing smothering defense and scoring just a little bit more than the other team. Kansas, Arizona, and Duke are the fastest playing teams of the top eight, although they pale in comparison to the lightning fast LSU and BYU teams. If you love high-paced basketball, make your viewing over the next couple weeks more fun and favor the fast teams. If you love defense, you have some great options to go with as well.