Tag: march madness

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.

Sports Forecast for Thursday, March 19, 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 Northeastern Huskies vs. #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 12:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

Hooooray!! March Madness is here! Let’s get this thing started! Time to settle in on your coach or your bar stool or duck down in your cubicle and get your illicitly streaming phone or tablet going! Unless you’re a Notre Dame fan, you’re all going to be rooting for Northeastern here. The best part of March Madness is the madness — the upsets, so that’s what we want to see!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 UAB Blazers vs. #3 Iowa State Cyclones, 12:40 p.m. ET on TRU.

Okay, the first half of the Northeastern vs. Notre Dame game is over. Let’s switch over to the start of this game. What? What is TRU? Do I even get that channel? Ah, thank god for Sports Illustrated’s guide to finding TRU. Great, here we are. Hmmmm…. UAB’s name is “Blazers” and their mascot is a dragon? Who wants to bet that the dragon was added in later to bowdlerize the original meaning of the nickname. No, don’t look it up, that’s what bar bets are for.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 Georgia State Panthers vs. #3 Baylor Bears, 1:40 p.m. ET on TBS.

Okay, the first two games aren’t going to satisfy the country’s itch for an upset, so maybe this one will. Why the heck did the tournament decide to start with three #14 vs #3 matchups anyway? I’m guessing those are always the lowest rated games, so why not put them during the day when most people are at least supposed to be working anyway, but it does make for a bit of an inauspicious start to the tournament. Patience. Patience and more popcorn. Let’s go Georgia State! This would be a great upset story — their coach tore his achilles tendon while celebrating the win that put them into the tournament. He was hugging his son, a player on the team. Also, that guy Kevin Ware who broke his leg so terribly when he was on Louisville and they were in the Final Four a couple years ago is on this team.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 Texas Southern Tigers vs. #2 Arizona Wildcats, 2:10 p.m. ET on TNT.

Okay, so this is unlikely to be a competitive game, but it does give all of us a chance to actually see Arizona. Unless you’re on the West Coast or are a real college basketball junkie, you probably haven’t seen the Wildcats play yet this year and they’re supposed to be one of the two or three teams that could give Kentucky a run for their money. Are they really that good?

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #11 Texas Longhorns vs. #6 Butler Bulldogs, 2:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

Here we go! Two hours and thirty minutes since the tournament began and we’ve got what should be a real, competitive game. Not only is a 11 vs. 6 closer on paper than the earlier games but Texas is an unusually talented 11 seed. They’re one of those teams that, if they could put their shit together and play well for a week or two, could make a deep run. Butler, the team that’s used to playing the role of the underdog, is the overdog in this matchup and it should be interesting to see how they react.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #11 UCLA Bruins vs. #6 SMU Mustangs, 3:10 p.m. ET on TRU.

UCLA was once the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team of men’s basketball. They won everything all the time. Nowadays? Not so much. SMU is a different story. They’re coached by the 74 year-old peripatetic coach, Larry Brown, who is still the only coach to ever win an NCAA championship and an NBA one. Many people felt they should have gotten into the tournament last year, so they’re a bit of a sentimental favorite this time around, now that they’ve made it.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Ohio State Buckeyes vs. #7 VCU Rams, 4:10 p.m. ET on TBS.

Glurb. So much basketball. I gotta go do something else. But wait, this could be a good game. And after this one, there’s a quick break for an early dinner before the next one comes on. I’ll stick it out. Plus, there’s some built in interest here. The favorite in this game is VCU, a team from a small conference, and the underdog is Ohio State, a big school from a big conference. If you need a tie-breaker to figure out who to root for, VCU’s coach is named Shaka Smart!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Lafayette Leopards vs. #1 Villanova Wildcats, 6:50 p.m. ET on TBS.

“You’ve had your dinner,” the March Madness gods chortle, “now get back to the TV!” You meekly obey and watch poor Lafayette’s ritual slaughter at the hands of Villanova.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 Purdue Boilermakers vs. #8 Cincinnati Bearcats, 7:10 p.m. ET on CBS.

Now we’re cooking with gas. The second of four games all starting within 40 minutes. An 8 vs. 9 game is always a toss-up in terms of predicting what is going to happen and usually it’s a close game too. It’s hard to get too excited about either of these moderately successful teams in big, power conferences, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Cincinnati. They just seem like a tough team most of the time.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 Harvard vs. #4 North Carolina, 7:20 p.m. ET on TNT.

This is Harvard’s fourth appearance in the NCAA Tournament in a row. They’ve won their first game the last two years, upsetting higher ranked teams both times. This has a lot of people anticipating this game and hoping that Harvard can make it three in a row and show up the North Carolina basketball royalty. After a few minutes, you’ll realize this isn’t going to happen. Luckily, there’s lots of other games to watch.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #12 Stephen F. Austin vs. #5 Utah Runnin’ Utes, 7:27 p.m. ET on TRU.

This is another highly anticipated upset possibility. Two things play into that. First of all, there’s the tournament truism that a 12 always beats a 5. Also, Stephen F. Austin did it just last year when they beat number 5 seed VCU as a number 12 seed. Don’t buy into it. According to virtually all of the expert rankings out there, Utah is closer to a top ten team this year than the 20-24th best team their seed would suggest. They should be able to handle Stephen F. Austin.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 LSU Tigers vs. #8 North Carolina State Wolfpack, 9:20 p.m. ET on TBS.

Entering the home stretch for day one of the tournament. Only three games left. This is a sneaky good game. LSU has a couple of solid NBA prospects on their team, which is surprisingly something a lot of these teams can’t say, and North Carolina State actually beat Duke, Louisville, and North Carolina this year, so you know they can put on a show.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Hampton Pirates vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 9:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

One day a 16 seed will beat a 1 seed. It won’t be today. One day Kentucky might lose but also, not today. I find it interesting that CBS would even want to show this game but I guess Kentucky is the biggest star of this tournament and even showing them in a blowout will get great ratings.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 Eastern Washington Eagles vs. #4 Georgetown Hoyas, 9:57 p.m. ET on TRU.

And now, finally, the game we’ve all been waiting for. This is one of the most popular choices for a big upset in round one. Somewhere between 15-20% of everyone who’s filled in a bracket thinks that the Eastern Washington Eagles are going to beat the Georgetown Hoyas. Why is this? Well, for one thing, a lot of people felt that Georgetown should really have been seeded lower than they were — that they made a better 5 or 6 seed than a 4 seed. Also, Georgetown has been a disappointing tournament team over the last few years. In fact, they haven’t made it past the first week of games since 2007.

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

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 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

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. 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.

 

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Chalk

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. Today we’re starting with chalk.

Chalk is the simplest way to fill out a March Madness bracket. In every game, simply take the team with the better seed. Here’s a quick explanation in case you don’t know what that means. The 64 teams that will start the tournament on Thursday are divided up into four groups of 16 teams each. Within each group, the teams are ranked or seeded from 1 to 16 with the number one team being the most accomplished and likely to win and the number 16 team being the least. In the first round, 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so on. Taking chalk means that you pick the team with the better seed (lower numbers are better) in every game.

This term is widely used but doesn’t seem to have a clear derivation. The New Republic and Visual Thesaurus both believe it comes from a time when most betting was done in person at horse races and the odds were maintained by a bookie with a blackboard and a piece of chalk.

The benefit of picking chalk is that you’re almost alway going to be in the running to win your bracket pool. The downside is that you’re almost guaranteed not to win. Chalk is something of a default strategy. Although very few people choose all chalk for their entire bracket, for any given game, more people are going to predict the team with the better seed to win than to predict an upset. Choosing all chalk means that you get the points that most other people get but you’ll never get a point that they don’t. As time goes by, you’ll settle into the top third of the entries but won’t have a very good chance of winning the whole thing. Someone who predicts even a single upset correctly will probably have a better score.

Of course, sometimes chalk is a good idea. Imagine you were playing against only one other person and you knew that she was going to pick a bunch of upsets. By taking all chalk, you’d be pitting her ability to predict the future against the NCAA Tournament selection committee. And that’s a bet, I’d be willing to take. The smaller your bracket pool, the more likely it is for an all-chalk bracket to win. In a larger pool, it’s basically impossible that one of the entries won’t be better than chalk by accurately predicting a major upset.

I’m sure someone more well versed in mathematics or economics could explain the logic of chalk not winning better than me. What I can add to the discussion though, is that picking chalk is less fun than other strategies. One of the best parts of watching college sports and particularly March Madness is that emotion can often carry an underdog to a victory against an overdog. It’s more fun to root for a 13 seed no one has ever heard of with players that won’t make it in the NBA than it is to root for the 4 seed they play against whose players and coaches are virtually professional already. If you choose all chalk, you don’t get to root for upsets and rooting for upsets is fun.

Tune back in later for more (and more fun) ways of filling out a bracket.

Can you explain conference championship tournaments in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

I don’t get it. College basketball has the perfect tournament called March Madness. Why does it need to have these extra conference championships? What’s the point? Why would anyone bother watching when the real competition is yet to come?

Thanks,
Lori

Dear Lori,

It’s true, the NCAA Basketball tournament, popularly called March Madness, is a wonderfully fun event. The tournament is 64 (technically 68 teams for the men’s tournament now, but most people still think of it as 64 for men and women) of the best college basketball teams in the country, playing in a single-elimination tournament until only one team is left. Before that happens though, almost every conference  (all but one, the Ivy League) will have a conference championship tournament. These tournaments are happening now, in the two weeks before the NCAA tournament begins. Compared to March Madness, these tournaments may seem underwhelming, but they’re important for a variety of reasons. Their most important meaning does relate to the NCAA championship tournament. Every winner of a conference championship will get an automatic bid or place in March Madness. This shapes the conference tournaments and their meaning for the teams that play in them. It all depends on what type of team you are in what kind of conference.

Conferences come in all shapes and sizes but we can break them up into three categories: power conferences, tiny conferences, and in-between conferences. Tiny conferences usually only get one place in March Madness. Power conferences may get five, six, seven, or even eight teams into the tournament. The in-between conferences vary from year to year, depending on the quality of the teams in their league that year, but they might get two or three teams in.

For a team in a tiny conference, winning the conference championship is the only way to qualify for March Madness. For these teams, their conference championship is the pinnacle of competition. They know that they probably don’t have much of a chance to win a game in the NCAA tournament, much less win the overall championship. This transforms March Madness from being the tournament to being almost thought of as a prize for winning the conference tournament. Win the conference tournament and they’ll get to say, for the rest of their lives, that they played in March Madness. Being a dominant team in a one-bid league also means that the conference championship is a perilous time. There’s no rule that says a league only gets one bid. Non-automatic bid teams are selected for March Madness by a committee and there’s no guarantee that the committee will select a team with a very good record from a weak conference if it doesn’t win its conference tournament.

The situation in power conferences are different. The top teams in these conferences are basically guaranteed a tournament spot, even if they don’t win their conference tournaments. For these teams, the conference tournament is a chance to show off for the committee and hopefully get a higher seed in (and therefore an easier path through) the NCAA tournament. The teams in the middle of the power conference standings are the ones playing for bigger stakes. Win the conference tournament or at least get close, and they could rescue a mediocre season by qualifying for the tournament.

The experience in the  in-between conferences, as you might guess, falls in-between the tiny and the power conference championship experience with one twist. These conferences often have one or two teams that are virtually guaranteed a tournament spot based on their regular season success. If they win their conference tournament, they get an automatic bid as well. If a surprise team from the in-between conference wins the conference tournament instead, that team will get the automatic bid. The favored team or teams in these conferences will probably still get their spots, meaning that instead of two spots in March Madness, the conference might get three; instead of three, they might get four. Every spot comes at the cost of another team elsewhere in the country, so you’ll see teams in one conference root for the favorite in another conference just so that a surprise team doesn’t eat up an automatic spot in the tournament.

Conference tournaments are exciting in their own right, but they do lead to some potential for counter-intuitive incentives. Like in European club soccer, as I recently explored in a post on whether or not teams always actually “play to win the game,” some teams may go into their conference championships with other things on their mind. Avoiding injury or testing a new strategy could be more important to a team that already feels it has a spot in March Madness wrapped up than winning the conference championship. For years, the Big East was widely thought of as the best and most physical basketball conference in the country. Teams that won or even just went very far in the Big East conference championships often were so physically and mentally drained by the effort that they couldn’t play their best in the NCAA Tournament. This sparked two competing lines of thought. One was that Big East teams shouldn’t try to hard to win their conference championship. The other was that winning the Big East title was in some ways more prestigious than winning March Madness itself.

This year, the power conferences (for the men’s tournament) are the Big 12, Big Ten, Big East, ACC, and SEC. The in-betweens are the American, Mountain West, Pac-12, Atlantic 10, West Coast, and Missouri Valley conferences. The other leagues are mostly tiny conferences with one bid, but of course, we won’t know until the selection committee releases their choices. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Why is March Madness the Best?

As one of my oldest sports-watching-friends and a big college basketball fan, I thought Brendan Gilfillan could help me answer the question, “why is March Madness the best?” What follows is a rambling email exchange between the two of us marginally focused on that question. My writing is in italics, Brendan’s in plain text.

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Obviously it’s hard to objectively say what sporting event is the best to watch but people who love college basketball are often quite passionate in arguing that the men’s college basketball postseason tournament commonly known as March Madness, is the absolute greatest sports experience of the year. Why do you think that is?

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The first four days: no matter when you turn on a TV, you’ll see hundreds of 18-22 year-olds put under an incredible amount of pressure. Needless to say, that results in some pretty incredible stuff: heartbreaking, skull-thumping mistakes, once-in-a-lifetime performances, and absolute unparalleled chaos. Because of the format, it’s the sporting playoff where sheer unpredictability reigns most supreme (the NFL comes closest, in my opinion). There are other, lesser reasons: unlike the NBA most players aren’t talented enough to score consistently, which forces coaches to use some diverse and creative offenses; and for a lot of these players, this is the end of their athletic career, which adds an additional sense of desperation.

But for me, the central reason is the sheer nuttiness that ensues when you put kids under the spotlight in a single elimination tournament many of them have been looking forward to their entire lives. It’s kind of like why the Olympics are so intense, but magnified because the sport is more accessible and easier to follow/invest in over the course of a season.

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The question of unpredictability is a good one — I think we had a post answering the question “are predictable sports more popular” but I don’t think we came to any real conclusion. The NBA is known as the most predictable sport. Funny that basketball can be the most and the least predictable just at different levels. The difference has something to do with the skill and ability to withstand pressure of the players but there are some important format differences too. The college game is shorter (forty minutes instead of forty-eight,) and the shot clock is longer (35 seconds instead of 24.) This leads to lower scoring games with fewer possessions and therefore more chance for an on-average weaker team to come out victorious. The format of the playoffs (single elimination instead of a seven game series) is also a big factor in making college basketball less predictable. How do you rationalize the obsession of sports fans with determining who the best team is with an enjoyment of unpredictability which inevitably leads to a less conclusive champion?

You’re absolutely right about the first four days though. They are so exciting. The first four days of the tournament winnows the field from 64 teams to 32 and then to 16. So that’s… 40 games in four days. I remember a time when I was at work… but keeping an eye on the games on one side of my monitor… and a colleague of mine on the opposite end of the office and I let out a yell at the same time when someone hit a buzzer-beating shot to win a game. Classic moment in lost productivity. How do you think the advent of streaming games on computers and tablets has changed how people consume the tournament, especially those hectic first four days?

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Do you think sports fans are obsessed with determining who the best team is? I guess every fan is after something different in sports. I’m in it for the experiences and moments, not for justice.

Although I’d argue that the best team is the team that performs best when it matters most. This is an age-old argument, but I don’t understand how you can have the best team if you lose when the stakes are the highest (even in the event of injury, horrific officiating – great teams overcome!). You may have the most talented collection of players, but whatever thing you need to put you over the top when there’s no margin for error is what makes a team the “best.” Do you (or fans you know) end up disappointed when the “wrong” team wins, assuming they don’t have a direct rooting interest in that team? I guess I can understand that…it’s just not how I experience sports.

re: streaming games – I don’t how much it’s changed it for the diehards, cause they are more likely to skip work altogether, buy a case of beer and a family-size bag of Doritos and camp out on the couch in a tee-shirt, tube socks and sweatpants(if they’re wearing pants at all), moving only to perform the most urgent bodily functions. There’s nothing nastier than the smell of an NCAA-tourney diehard on that first Sunday night. But more fans watching more games early on means they’ll be more invested in those teams as they advance. They get invested in individual players, know their stories, and ultimately end up feeling genuine disappointment/elation at their performance – feelings that are completely out of proportion to any actual impact on their own lives.

Another thing on college sports (in my experience, basketball) in general: the fun of college basketball isn’t in seeing the guys who are just stopping over on their way to the pros. The fun is in seeing a guy like Markel Starks – Georgetown’s starting point guard. I remember watching him in person his freshman year, when he only got in during garbage time. I somehow ended up sitting next to some of his friends/family – they were cheering for everything he did despite the fact that it had no impact on the outcome of the game. And he wasn’t very good then – he sat behind better players for most of his career, and spent his time getting a little better each year, without any guarantee other than his coach’s word that it’d work out.

Watching him progress over those four years – and then watching him this year, when he’s all Big East first team, when he was amazing on senior night in an upset win over Creighton that we absolutely had to have – is what college sports is all about. There’s usually guys like that on every team – guys who may or may not go pro, here or abroad – and this is their time in the spotlight.

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I do think there’s some serious interest in at least the appearance of determining who the actual best team is. For evidence of this, look at the enormous mess that has been made of college football in the past twenty years in an attempt to create a post-season format that better determines the national champion. Not to pour salt in a very old wound but if the NBA was a single elimination tournament, your 76ers would have beaten the Lakers in the 2001 finals and the lasting image would have been Allen Iverson stepping over Tyrone Lue. Instead, the Lakers won the seven game series decisively 4-1. There’s truth to the narrative about players and teams playing their best when it counts but there’s a whole lot of luck involved too.

Technology has definitely changed the way even die-hard fans consume March Madness. Even the earliest streaming websites and apps allowed for the consumer to choose which game to watch. On TV, the games were only on one channel, and someone at the station would decide who saw what game and when to switch from a less competitive game to a closer one. Now I believe that every game is televised in full by CBS Sports taking over a bunch of networks in their… network. This puts the onus on the viewer just like in a streaming type situation. I have to say, I miss the more curated experience of watching whatever was on CBS the whole weekend. What do you think? Has technology made the viewing experience better or worse for you?

Great point about feeling a connection with the players. That’s something that’s more difficult to do with professional sports because the life of a millionaire professional athlete is so far from identifiable for most of us, unfortunately. Not that the life of a stud college athlete is all that different but at least many of us went to college and can identify with some of the elements (exams, hormone-driven obsession with romance, weekend drinking, etc.) of their lives. You can also identify with Starks because you went to Georgetown but for people like me whose colleges don’t have top-level basketball programs, there’s always a team to latch on to during the tournament whether it’s an exciting Cinderella story, a regional team, a friend’s alma mater, or just a team we favor for our bracket.

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Red herrings, all! I think the issue with college football is that the champion is too frequently not being determined on the field, which means there can’t be any sort of justice. I also think the Lakers/Sixers argument is flawed, as much as I enjoy picturing that step-over (top 3 highlight of my sports fan existence…picturing now…that little head nod where he almost looked down, then seemed to decide Lue didn’t even warrant it). The question those teams were trying to answer was who would be best over a seven game series, not in a single elimination game. Everyone’s approach to that game changes if it’s winner take all. And as much as I love AI, I don’t think he’s able to drag that team over the hump when both Kobe and Shaq know it’s all or nothing.

The streaming thing has been net positive for me – I think anything that gives fans more agency is better. What non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…not only in the beginning but potentially in real time.

Your favorite playoffs – at least I think – are the Stanley Cup playoffs, right? Is it cause the familiarity built up over seven games yields such intense/high-level play?

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Hey now, “what non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…” That sounds like something Dear Sports Fan should be doing! Maybe we can do that this year.

You’re right, my favorite playoffs are ones based on seven game series. It’s not so much that they are better at determining which team is better (although they are dramatically better at that) it’s more about the drama that they produce. Seven games is an eternity for two teams to play against each other at the highest level with elimination at stake. Invariably, players start to hate each other; a dirty hit in game one will be retaliated for in game five. The tactics that worked one game will be countered the following game. There’s so much more depth to watching a series than a single game. And in terms of raw excitement, every series ends with an elimination game — sometimes, in the case of game sevens — for both teams. That’s really the perfect mix, a single elimination game with six games of history before it.

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Well but just as often the elimination game comes at 3-0 or 3-1 or something – there’s no guarantee of a game 7, whereas with the NCAA it’s all elimination games. I do think the seven game series is uniquely suited for hockey – it’s kind of a grind in baseball, where the strategic changes are much less interesting and teams’ retaliation is limited to pointless milling about in each other’s vicinity. Basketball is closer but you don’t necessarily see the intensity you do in hockey – or, that you saw in the NBA 30 years ago. Everyone’s competitive but you don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of hatred there.

What about Olympic hockey, though? Did you enjoy that less than the NHL playoffs cause of the format?

[some time elapses]

And now I’ve tasted my own mutton…how do I like the taste? Georgetown lost a single-elimination game in the Big East tournament to a “lesser team,” meaning they will definitely not go on to the NCAA tournament. It’s pretty disheartening. Georgetown is clearly “better” than DePaul – they’ve played and beaten better teams, have a better record, have more talent. But when it came down to a single game with real stakes, DePaul flat-out outplayed them. No excuse, no fluke, they were the better team last night.

So justice was done. The same things that plagued Georgetown all year – and put us in the position of needing this win – did us in last night. No front-line scoring cause of the suspension of Josh Smith, who was clearly way too integral to our plans for a transfer with a shaky past; offensive droughts and the occasional, incredibly poorly timed defensive lapse; and generally playing down to the level of our competition. How else to explain a season sweep to Seton Hall? A loss to Northeastern?

Sigh.

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I think we’ve come full circle here. I’m sure you’ll still be able to enjoy watching March Madness starting next week. Maybe even more now that the excitement and unpredictability can’t harm your rooting interests any further.