To many people, March may seem like a throw away month. The weather is cold and gray in most places, besides St. Patrick’s Day there’s no major holiday, and it mostly just serves as an in-between waiting month for spring. But for other people, March is one of the most exciting points in the entire year.
The March Madness tournament is the annual playoffs for the college basketball season, and it’s in many degrees the most interesting of it’s kind. The largest bracket of any playoff series, 32 games between 64 teams take place all over the course of just two days. For many fans, pro-basketball can’t compare to the raw energy of the college season.
“The NBA just doesn’t have the same soul as college” said junior Tom Trybula. “Seeing all these smaller schools complete with the bigger Blue Bloods and powerhouses is just a lot more blood pumping.”
Ahead of the games, many people create brackets predicting the outcome of the tournament. Bracketology, the art and science of predicting which teams will make the tournament, is one of the most interesting phenomenons in organized sports. The majority of the people who make these brackets will analyze every factor imaginable trying to figure out who will end up taking it home. But often, these people aren’t even the ones who create the most accurate predictions. Many people I know take the route of the “personal predictor”, picking teams not based on their actual likelihood of winning it all, but instead because they like that school’s mascot more or are rival fans of their football team.
“The way it brings people together over something so complicated that they wouldn’t normally get into is maybe my favorite part of it,” said junior Jordan Ochoa.
Every time these picks are, of course, the most accurate out of any bracket pool I’m in. To try and pick a perfect bracket is a chance of 1 in 9.2 quintillion. To even pick the right champion is an up-hill battle as perhaps no other competition features upsets quite as much as the March Madness tournament. “Every year, my bracket is doing great. That is until the throw away 12 seed ends up knocking down the 5 seed in the first round,” Ochoa said.
I myself am a Marquette Golden Eagles fan. While I knew there was no chance they would make it to the final four, let alone win the championship, I still thought there was a solid chance they’d make it as far as the sweet 16, or at the very least, the second round. They have Kam Jones, one of the top five players in the tournament, have been having an excellent season, and made it pretty deep last year with mostly the same roster. They lost 75-66 in the first round to the New Mexico Lobos who, coincidentally, also fell in the first round last year. And that’s exactly what makes the tournament so exciting, the unpredictability.
Unlike its more famous college counterpart football, smaller much lesser known schools tend to populate the bracket. Schools like St. John’s and McNeese State have become tournament darlings, both of which are much less popular of schools than something like Tennessee or LSU are, but they still occupy just as relevant a spot.
“The tournament gives every school a chance to get recognized, allowing smaller programs to go on Cinderella runs,” said Ochoa, “Like DJ Burns and NC State making it to the final four last year or Steph Curry and Davidson.”
The 2018 Loyola Ramblers making the Final Four is a personal favorite of mine. Every year these small, double digit seeded programs will somehow be able to hang with the big dogs, holding their own and sometimes even dominating the competition to make it further down. As of this year, only larger teams are sticking around, but some programs still seem primed for an upset.
Another thing that makes it so exciting is the way you can see future NBA stars blossom in the games, usually accompanied by some iconic moment or team. People like Michael Jordan and the championship winning shot with North Carolina In 1982; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the 12 year long, 10 championship dynasty UCLA Bruins; Carmelo Anthony and the championship Syracuse team, Anthony Davis and Kentucky, Allen Iverson and Georgetown, Derrick Rose and Memphis, the list goes on. This year, Cooper Flagg at Duke has become not just the best player in college basketball, not just a clear future super-star when he turns pro, but according to many, has the makings of one of the greatest players of all time. I myself picked him and the Blue Devils to take it all this year, but with the nature of the tournament I would be very unsurprised if they are knocked out in the next round. (They lost to Houston in the final game earlier this month.)
