Some would say there's a formula to the lunacy. Millions watch CBS Selection Sunday. ..... follow that with hours of "Bracketology" where the "analysts" dissect each game.....and then it's time for making an "educated" guess for an individual bracket which gets dropped into a contest, company "pool" or family challenge. If anything has been proven over the years, it's that there is NO recipe for success. Some entrants choose the winners by mascots, some flip a coin, others fall in love with school colors or there is the method of going strictly by the higher seeded team and God knows what else. No matter the philosophy used, each thinks their bracket is the winner. Is that delusional or what?
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| Will Kentucky Reach the Top Again? |
For the NCAA, there is a method for this madness. The basketball tournament funds up to 96 percent of their annual budget. It has become a cultural, financial success that has generated huge television ratings. Last year offered something new for the viewer. "All the games all the time" was a ratings success the first weekend of March Madness. Instead of just some of the games on CBS, every NCAA tournament game -- First Four, second and third rounds -- was on CBS, TBS, TNT or TRU-TV. The first round games averaged 8.4 million viewers, a 14% increase over last year.
When news broke last year that an autistic teen named Alex Hermann had picked every game correctly through the first two rounds of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, reports focused on the unlikelihood of the event. After all, the odds of maintaining a perfect bracket through two rounds—if you choose the top seeds in every game—are a mere 1 in 13,460,000. (Alex's unlikely feat appears to be unverifiable, because the website he used allowed changes after the fact, but for our purposes we'll assume it happened as reported.)
What people often lose sight of amid the excitement and human interest of stories like this is the fact that extremely unlikely things happen every day. People win the lottery, even though the odds a Mega Millions entry will win the jackpot are just 1 in 175,700,000 and the odds for a Powerball entry are 1 in 195,200,000. Those odds are an order of magnitude less likely than Alex's March Madness picks (assuming, for the sake of argument, he chose the top seeds).
Okay, back to the fun. How good of an evaluator of match-ups are you? Are you lucky? Or do you "wing it" with your predictions? And.....what's at stake in the pool you're in? Bragging rights, money, a trip or maybe some type of trophy.
Eight years ago, I put together a NCAA Bracket Challenge for our family. The winner each year of the the pool is awarded the Kelling Family NCAA Traveling Trophy (two-foot high trophy with a basketball in a globe). For some 350 plus days, the champion gets to maintain his superiority over the rest of the contestants. Some winners have taken the trophy to work as a conversation piece, another put it on a mantle in the living room and others have put it away for safekeeping.....hoping "additional" care will enable them to defend their title. It's been a whole lot of fun even though it took me six years to win the darn thing. My youngest son won twice and my mother and sister hoisted the trophy once before I did. Think it wasn't a relief when I finally won?
Who's the favorite this year? Most would say Kentucky.... a team on a mission to win its eighth National Championship. But there's also Syracuse, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas or a team I like watching, Missouri. Could Murray State be this year's Cinderella ala Butler or VCU? Time will tell.
This weekend we turn back our clocks with Daylight Savings and it's Selection Sunday. What a couple of great ways to help us acknowledge that spring is here and NCAA insanity is about to begin.
Good luck with your bracket/brackets and keep reading,
John
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