I have been feeling even more than usually out of the mainstream lately, having been beaten about the head, boxed about the ears, and generally assaulted on all sides by people yammering about "March Madness" and "brackets." "It's all about the brackets," someone on the radio says. On WTOP this morning they could hardly get any real news out of their mouths without bringing up March Madness and brackets. The weather and traffic were laced with it, lowering, I must admit, in some small measure, my esteem for Brian VanDeGraaf and Lisa Baden.
Yesterday I had the radio on for a while, and someone called in to Cerphe on 94.7 The Globe. Cerphe asked him how he was doing with his brackets, and what had been his biggest upset so far. (This was on 14 March.) The guy then went on to yak about some team from some school, and I found myself thinking that the tournament had already begun, else how could one have an upset? But this morning the news was filled with gleeful tidings that today, the Ides of March, was the first day of play.
And I couldn't understand what the fuss about brackets was about. Were they not pre-printed? Or was it an arduous job of hand copying that one had to endure?
It was obvious that I had little knowledge of these things that everyone (or at least the people getting on the elevator, and on the radio) else seemed to have absorbed deeply into their souls. Now I have no real interest in college basketball, and no teams I am morally bound to support. I wish them all well, but I don't have a dog in that fight and I don't really give a rat's rump who wins the NCAA. Or the NIT, for that matter.
It also should be clear that I have never participated in an office pool, not for March Madness or for football or for anything else. At bottom, I don't have any interest in gambling, or office pools, so that's not a big deal. It must be admitted that I have never been asked to participate in one. Not even remotely, obliquely, has anyone ever brought up the subject in a way that I might say, "Hey, could I get in on that?" Certainly no one has ever asked directly. That kind of thing doesn't happen to me; my vibrations don't work that way. (Took me many years to figure out that was what was going on.)
All of which left me with embarrassingly vague notions of how this March Bracketness thing works. To remedy this, I went to Wikipedia, which, however one might criticize it, sure has a lot of information on a lot of stuff. And this is what I learned:
The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship is a single elimination tournament held each spring featuring 65[1] college basketball teams in the United States. Colloquially known as March Madness (as the tournament takes place mainly during the month of March) or the Big Dance (as opposed to the now smaller and less prestigious NIT), the tournament takes place over 3 weeks at sites across the U.S., and the national semifinals (the Final Four) have become one of the nation's most prominent sports events.
Since its 1939 inception (a brainchild of Phog Allen at the University of Kansas), it has built a legacy that includes dynasty teams and dramatic underdog stories. In recent years, friendly wagering on the event has become something of a national pastime, spawning countless "office pools" that attract expert fans and novices alike. All games of the tournament are broadcast on the CBS broadcast television network in the United States, except for the Opening Round game (or "play-in game" as it has been called), which aired on TNN in 2001, and ESPN since 2002.
March Madness is a popular term for season-ending basketball tournaments played in March (Brent Musburger is generally regarded as the individual who first used that phrase in conjunction with the college tournament, using it during CBS Sports' coverage of the tourney back in 1982 - see below), especially those conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and various state high school associations. The phrase was not associated with the college tournament in 1939, when an Illinois official wrote "A little March Madness [may] contribute to sanity." March Madness is also a registered trademark, held jointly by the NCAA and the Illinois High School Association. The trademark has sparked a pair of high-profile courtroom battles in recent years.
March Madness refers to the frenzy these tournaments ignite among sports fans and, at least at the college level, sports gamblers. As it applies to college basketball, the term originally referred to the conference basketball tournaments, which occur in March just before the NCAA tournament begins, but in recent years has been used to refer to the NCAA tournament itself (the first weekend of which involves some 49 games, and which actually runs into early April). The term is now used in reference to both the men's and women's tournaments. The Big Dance also refers exclusively to the NCAA Tournaments to distinguish them from the conference tournaments and the NIT.
Brackets and picks
During March Madness, many people enjoy predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournaments. The first recorded "Bracket Pool" was originated by Raymond Van Stone in Fairfield , CT circa 1980. Van Stone was the Sports Information Director of Fairfield University and a sports writer for the Bridgeport Post at the time. Bracketology is the art of picking the correct teams that will be in the tournaments. The 65 (including the 2 teams who compete in the opening round game) participating teams are announced by the selection committee on Selection Sunday, although some teams are known to have made it already by winning their conference tournament (See: At-large bid, Automatic bid). The teams are seeded from 1 to 16 in 4 regional groupings around the country. The eventual winners of the four regions then meet at the Final Four in a predetermined location. The four seeds play out the tournament through single elimination until a National Champion is crowned.
As a tournament ritual, the winning team cuts down the net at the end of the regional championship game. Each player cuts a single strand off of the net for themselves, commemorating their victory.
Many people fill out tournament brackets in office pools. Entrance fees and legality of the pools themselves vary. Whoever accumulates the most points by accurately predicting the outcomes of the games wins the grand prize, most often pooled from the entrance fees. Points are assessed in different ways; one example is given below:
- First round: 2 point per winning team.
- Second round: 4 points per winning team.
- Third round: 8 points per winning team.
- Fourth round: 16 points per winning team.
- Fifth round: 32 points per winning team.
- Sixth round: 64 points for predicting National Champion.
The point total steadily increases by round in order to reward those players who correctly picked teams that would go further in the tournament.
If at the end of the tournament two players have the same point total, a tie is often broken by the total number of total points scored in the Championship Game.
So that's it. I don't imagine I will watch any of the games, or make any money, but I don't feel quite so ignorant any more.
