Sports Forecast for Thursday, March 26, 2015

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:

  • International Men’s Soccer – Brazil at France, 4 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
  • NBA Basketball – Indiana Pacers at Milwaukee Bucks, 8 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NHL Hockey – Montreal Canadiens at Winnipeg Jets, 8 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NCAA Men’s Basketball – March Madness, 7:15 p.m. ET on CBS and TBS.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.

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.

Sports Forecast for Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:

  • International Men’s Soccer – United States at Denmark, 3:15 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
  • NBA Basketball – Chicago Bulls at Toronto Raptors, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NBA Basketball – Oklahoma City Thunder at San Antonio Spurs, 9:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NHL Hockey – Chicago Blackhawks at Philadelphia Flyers, 8 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.

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

Sports Forecast for Sunday, March 21, 2015 – March Madness Edition

We’re interrupting our normal daily sports forecasts to concentrate on March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and American cultural obsession. We’ll run you through the games each day and give you a little flavor for each one.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Michigan State Spartans vs. #2 Virginia Cavaliers, 12:10 p.m. ET on CBS.

The first game of the day could easily be the best game of the weekend. The Cavaliers make it hard for teams they play against by playing strong, physical, smothering defense and slow but effective offense. Michigan State is a chameleon of a team that may not mind playing Virginia’s type of game.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #8 San Diego State Aztecs vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 2:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

With Villanova losing last night, we’re down to three 1 seeds left in the tournament. Most of America will be rooting for San Diego State to reduce that number by another but I doubt they’ll be able to beat Duke to do it.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Wichita Shockers vs. #2 Kansas Jayhawks, 5:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

This battle of Kansas has been highly anticipated from the moment the bracket was released. These two teams, despite being neighbors, have not actually played a game against each other since 1993. Kansas is the traditional basketball power in the state but Vegas has this game as almost a dead even matchup.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #11 Dayton Flyers vs. #3 Oklahoma Sooners, 6:10 p.m. ET on TNT.

With UAB and Georgia State losing yesterday, Dayton became one of the few remaining teams that could seriously be called underdogs. Oklahoma had a reasonably easy first game against Albany while Dayton has had to play two tough, close games. Watch for Dayton to show its fatigue in down moments of this game.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Iowa Hawkeyes vs. #2 Gonzaga Bulldogs, 7:10 p.m. ET on TBS.

Both these teams had an unexpectedly easy time in their first round matchups. Because they won so easily, it feels like we don’t know what to expect in this game.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #8 Oregon Ducks vs. #1 Wisconsin Badgers, 7:45 p.m. ET on TRU.

These schools have totally oppositional characters when it comes to sports teams. Oregon is futuristic and sleek, Wisconsin, traditional and a little stodgy. Their characters are not always directly exhibited in how they play, more in how we observe them. This Wisconsin basketball team has a little more playfulness in their games than one would expect of a Wisconsin team.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #5 West Virginia Mountaineers vs. #4 Maryland Terrapins, 8:40 p.m. ET on TNT.

These well-matched teams will be competing for the opportunity to play against still-unbeaten Kentucky in the next round. Of the two teams, it seems like Maryland would have a better shot at upsetting Kentucky, so let’s root for them.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #5 University of Northern Iowa Panthers vs. #4 Louisville Cardinals, 9:40 p.m. ET on TBS.

Louisville broke my heart when they beat the UC Irvine Anteaters in a close game on Friday. Just for that, I’m hoping that the University of Northern Iowa and their star player Seth Tuttle make short work of the Cardinals today.

Sports Forecast for Saturday, March 20, 2015 – March Madness Edition

We’re interrupting our normal daily sports forecasts to concentrate on March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and American cultural obsession. We’ll run you through the games each day and give you a little flavor for each one.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 UAB Blazers vs. #11 UCLA Bruins, 12:10 p.m. ET on CBS.

This is a real glass-half-full, glass-half-empty game. On one hand, it’s impossible for both of these teams who provided us with exciting upsets in their first games to advance to the Sweet Sixteen. On the other hand, one of them surely will. Although their seeds are not so different, their history as basketball schools could not be more different. UAB is a true underdog. UCLA is an overdog fallen on hard times masquerading as an underdog. Because of that, I’ll be rooting for UAB.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #8 Cincinnati Bearcats vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 2:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

“What happens when a bearcat meets a wildcat” sounds like the start of a joke my friends and I would have told in middle school. What’s likely to happen here is that the Wildcats will win but one thing is for sure, they’re not going to escape a game with Cincinnati without a few bumps and bruises.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Ohio State Buckeyes vs. #2 Arizona Wildcats, 5:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

Ohio State needed overtime to get by VCU. Arizona waltzed by Texas Southern. Still, if Ohio State point guard D’Angelo Russell has enough in his tank after playing 44 minutes on Thursday, I could see Arizona having a tough time winning this game. Russell was one of the most impressive players I’ve seen so far in the tournament.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 Georgia State Panthers vs. #6 Xavier Musketeers, 6:10 p.m. ET on TNT.

Georgia State is the underdog everyone loves to love this year. Their star player is the coach’s son. Their coach tore his achilles celebrating with the team and seems determined to break something else as he continues to celebrate. Xavier should win this game but the entire world will be pulling for Georgia State.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #8 North Carolina State Wolfpack vs. #1 Villanova Wildcats, 7:10 p.m. ET on TBS.

Villanova was thought to be the weakest of the four 1 seeds coming into the tournament. The fact that this game is on TBS shows a continued lack of respect. The fun thing about sports is that we’ll get a clear signal from the outcome of the game about whether the disrespect was merited.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #5 Utah Utes vs. #4 Georgetown Hoyas, 7:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

Georgetown fans were breathing a sigh of relief after their team won its first game in the tournament. In recent years, the Hoyas have been prone to being upset by lower seeded teams early in the tournament. Losing this game wouldn’t be an upset. Utah and Georgetown are a pretty even matchup. Perhaps the most even of the day.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #5 Arkansas Razerbacks vs. #4 North Carolina Tarheels, 8:40 p.m. ET on TNT.

Both these teams just barely escaped being upset in the first round, North Carolina to Harvard and Arkansas to Woffard. Neither one looked very impressive but one of them will be moving on. I wonder if we’ll be more impressed with the teams in this game or equally nonplussed.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #6 Butler Bulldogs vs. #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 9:40 p.m. ET on TBS.

It seems like ages ago that Notre Dame opened the tournament with a close win over Northeastern. In real-time it was only Thursday afternoon. Butler beat a disjointed Texas team but one of their best players went down with a knee injury. They’ll need him playing at least at three-quarters strength in order to challenge Notre Dame.

Which March Madness region was most mad in the first round?

Yesterday, I introduced a new metric to the world of college sports, the Madness Metric. By subtracting the expected sum of the two seeds in each round, assuming only favorites win, from the sum of the seeds of the teams that are actually playing, we can get a fairly good sense of just how mad March Madness has really been. Now that the first round (the round of 64, which is officially called the second round but which everyone reasonable calls the first round) is done, I thought it would  be a good idea to check in on our new metric and calculate it for the first time. We’ll do it by region or quarter of the overall field. Each region has teams ranked or seeded from 1-16. In the first round, 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, and so on. In the second round, starting today, if all the favorites had won, 1 would play 8, 2 would play 7, 3 would play 6, and 4 would play 5. As you know from watching the last couple days of basketball, that’s not exactly how it worked out. The Madness Metric will tell us just how far off we are:

East (+5): Thanks to 11 seed Dayton beating 6 seed Providence. Many people feel like this wasn’t exactly fair because Dayton played their first game, the play-in game in their home stadium, and then this game nearby. Every other favorite in this region won their games.

Midwest (0): Not mad at all! All the favorites won.

West (+11): 10 seed Ohio State University beat 7 seeded VCU, but most of the +11 is due to the darlings of the tournament so far, 14 seed Georgia State which beat 3 seed Baylor, sending themselves to the round of 32 and their coach to the floor.

South (+16): This is the craziest of the regions and all its lunacy will be concentrated into one round of 32 game between 11 seed UCLA and 14 seed UAB. One of these Cinderella teams will be going to the sweet sixteen at least.

Total (+32): This is the first time I’ve ever calculated this metric, so I’m not sure about its history, but this doesn’t seem as crazy overall as one would have expected given that the first day was said to have been the craziest day ever. I’d have to do some historical analysis to figure this out.

As the tournament goes on, I’ll keep you posted about just how crazy it is. Thanks for reading.

 

March Madness mathematical musings

It’s March Madness time again, which means everyone is wandering around looking at print-outs or electronic versions of a bracket. The bracket shows a tournament with 64 teams divided into four groups of 16 each. Within each group of 16, the teams are ranked or seeded from 1 to 16. In the first round of the tournament, represented on the outside of the bracket, 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so on until you reach the 8 vs. 9 game. Many of these pairs of numbers are instantly recognizable to most sports fans. We all know that a 16 has never beaten a 1, that 12 seeds seem to upset 5 seeds more frequently than one would expect, and that once you get to an 8 vs. 9 or a 7 vs. 10 game, the teams are so evenly matched that you can’t call it an upset when the 9 or 10 seed wins. It occurred to me yesterday (this is a pretty obvious realization, but cut me some slack, I did have a fever) that if you add the two seed numbers, every matchup in the first round adds up to 17.

Cool! Now I know lots of ways to add to 17. I wasn’t sure how this was going to help me in life but I kept thinking. 17… 17 is one more than 16. 16 is the number of teams in each quarter of the tournament. So, the seed numbers add up to one more than the number of teams left in each quarter of the bracket. Does that work for later rounds too? Well, let’s assume there are no upsets in the first round. Seeds 1-8 advance, seeds 9-16 lose. 1 plays 8, 2 plays 7, 3 plays 6, and 4 plays 5 in the next round. All of those numbers add up to nine, which is one more than eight. Eight is the number of teams left in that side of the bracket! If you keep going with this logic, again with no upsets, it keeps working for a while. The next round would have 1 playing 4 and 2 playing 3. 1 beats 4, 2 beats 3, and then 1 and 2 play for the right to represent this quarter of the overall tournament in the… Final Four! That’s when the four groups of 16 teams merge and become a single tournament. This is where the logic breaks down, because you would expect all four 1 seeds to make it, so that round’s sum would be two even though there are four teams left and the same would be true for the final game when there are only two teams left.

I might have lost you there for a minute (or maybe forever) but I’m about to bring it back to reality a little. We know that the favorites don’t always win during March Madness. Yesterday it seemed like the favorites were barely going to win at all! Already we’ve had 14 seeds beat 3 seeds, 11 beating 6, and 9 beating 8. This means that things won’t work so nicely in the second round. For example, instead of 3 seed Iowa State playing 6 seed SMU (adds up to 9) in the next round, we’re going to have 14 seed UAB playing 11 seed UCLA. 14 plus 11 is 25 not 9. The sum trick only works if the favorites always win.

Once I realized this, I was disappointed for a few minutes. Being disappointed because upsets ruin my little math trick is silly, of course. Upsets are what make March Madness so great. They’re what puts the Madness in March Madness. Then I had a (minuscule) Eureka moment. We can quantify exactly how “mad” each quarter of the bracket is by adding up the seed numbers of the teams that advance and subtracting the number we would have gotten if all the favorites had won. Call it the Madness Metric™. Using that same example of UAB and UCLA advancing instead of Iowa State and SMU, you would take their seeds, 14 and 11, add them to get 25 and then subtract 9 (the expected seed sum for the next round of the tournament) to get 14. 14 is pretty mad!

It’s not an advanced metric by any means, but it is a fun way to compare the regions (each quarter of the tournament is called a region because it’s played in one spot, not because the teams are from one place) to see which one is the maddest of them all! I’ll report back at the end of each round on this metric.

Sports Forecast for Friday, March 20, 2015 – March Madness Edition

We’re interrupting our normal daily sports forecasts to concentrate on March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and American cultural obsession. We’ll run you through the games each day and give you a little flavor for each one.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 New Mexico State Aggies vs. #2 Kansas Jayhawks, 12:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

After yesterday’s historic insanity, it’s probably too much to hope for for this game to be close. Then again, if there was going to be a 2 seed that gets a real scare in the first round, it would be Kansas. Most of the computer rankings say that Kansas should be flattered to have even gotten ranked so highly by the tournament’s seeds.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Georgia Bulldogs vs. #7 Michigan State Spartans, 12:40 p.m. ET on TRU.

If you wanted an exhibit to show that coaching does matter in sports, particularly college basketball, you couldn’t find a better one than Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo. Despite not having the best players most years, his teams always seem to win at least a game or two in March Madness. They are favored over a solid but unspectacular Georgia team.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #12 Wyoming Cowboys vs. #5 Northern Iowa, 1:40 p.m. ET on TBS.

With all of yesterday’s upsets, the two 5 seeds actually managed to beat the 12 seeds they faced. The 12 over 5 upset is the one that armchair pundits (and we’re all armchair pundits, aren’t we?) everywhere look for. It just seems like at least one 12 seed always beats a 5. 538 ran an interesting article on why this might actually be true. Will Wyoming pull it off?

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #12 Buffalo Bulls vs. #5 West Virginia Mountaineers, 2:10 p.m. ET on TNT.

Or, maybe it’s Buffalo’s turn? Normally at this time of the year we’d see stories about how the snow struck city of Buffalo could really use something to cheer them up but this year, compared to Boston, living in Buffalo was like having a time-share in Palm beach. It’s hard to root against West Virginia and their pressing defense.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Indiana Hoosiers vs. #7 Wichita State Shockers, 2:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

This is one of the few NCAA Tournament games that feels like a preview to coming attractions. If Wichita State can get by the Indiana Hoosiers, it will (probably) set up a matchup with in-state rival Kansas on Sunday. Everyone outside of Indiana is rooting for this to happen but I wonder if Wichita’s players will be guilty of looking ahead and get caught for it here.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 Belmont Bruins vs. #2 Virginia Cavaliers, 3:10 p.m. ET on TRU.

It seems funny to stick a 2 seed on TRU TV but Virginia is no normal 2 seed. They play a slow, grind-it-out, defensive game. I guess the TV schedulers might have felt that their play was too slow for most viewers. I have to say, I’m curious to see it. The slower you play, the fewer possessions the game has, and the fewer possessions the game has, the higher the chance for luck to play a role in the outcome. Maybe Belmont can get a few bounces and keep this close or even win?!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 UC Irvine Anteaters vs. #4 Louisville Cardinals, 4:10 p.m. ET on TBS.

THE ANTEATERS ARE GOING TO WIN, THE ANTEATERS ARE GOING TO WIN! Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia page on anteaters: “When a territorial dispute occurs, they vocalize, swat, and can sometimes sit on or even ride the back of their opponents.” THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 Valparaiso Crusaders vs. #4 Maryland Terrapins, 4:40 p.m. ET on TNT.

Take some time before this game to read Jeremy Pahl’s wonderful article about growing up in Valparaiso and what basketball meant to him, his father, and the whole city. You’ll be pulling for the Crusaders afterwards.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 Oklahoma State Cowboys vs. #8 Oregon Ducks, 6:50 p.m. ET on TBS.

Oklahoma State lost six of its last seven games before today. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll just be able to snap out of it and win this game but stranger things have happened. Actually, about ten stranger things happened yesterday. Hmm…

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Robert Morris Dentists vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 7:10 p.m. ET on CBS.

What an amazing matchup! Dentists vs. Devils — hard to say which one is worse. Just kidding, the Robert Morris team is actually called the Colonials, not the Dentists, but how great would that be? Duke is the team that most of the country loves to hate and, knowing that a 16 seed has never beaten a 1 seed, my guess is that we’ll all get to hate Duke for a little while longer.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Davidson Wildcats vs. #7 Iowa Hawkeyes, 7:20 p.m. ET on TNT.

The funny thing about this game is that despite making the tournament, both these teams are afterthoughts in their own states. Iowa is not thought to be as good as Iowa State or Northern Iowa and Davidson, located in North Carolina, is nowhere near as good as North Carolina or Duke. It kind of makes me want them both to win, although that is obviously impossible.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 Albany Great Danes vs. #3 Oklahoma Sooners, 7:27 p.m. ET on TRU.

In case you’re wondering what a “Sooner” is, it’s a historical reference. A sooner was someone who jumped the gun and entered Oklahoma to claim what once was Native American land for themselves just before President Grover Cleveland legalized the land-rush in 1889. Perhaps not quite as bad as the Ole Miss Rebels historical nickname, it’s still pretty despicable. I guess we should all root for the dogs that look like horses team?

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Coastal Carolina Chanticleers vs. #1 Wisconsin Badgers, 9:20 p.m. ET on TBS.

Wisconsin is famous for choking in the NCAA Tournament and losing when they’re expected to win. If they do it tonight, they’ll be famous for it forever and ever.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 St. John’s Red Storm vs. #8 San Diego State Aztecs, 9:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

Alas, St. John’s big man, Chris Obepka, who made a name for himself this year for wearing short(er) shorts, is suspended for the tournament, so we won’t be graced by his leggy presence. Having seen St. John’s play in person just a week ago, I suspect we may not be graced by any of their presences for long. They didn’t seem like a very good basketball team to me.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 North Dakota State Bison vs. #4 Gonzaga Bulldogs, 9:57 p.m. ET on TRU.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you make it through to this game. That’s a lot of basketball in two days! Rest up, ’cause there’s more on Saturday and Sunday!

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.