It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Hoops World
March 15, 2005
by Brendon McCullin

March Madness. Two words that can stir the spirit of sports fans just as fully as its professional peers the Super Bowl and World Series. The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the official name, is the one college event – at least until college football manages a real championship – that can not only measure up to the spectacle of the big leagues but often times surpass it.

The tournament, with its single elimination format, is one of the last bastions of pure big time sporting enjoyment. College kids that aren’t getting paid – or at least aren’t supposed to be getting paid – trying to win for themselves and their school. For most of the teams involved winning the actual championship isn’t even the measure of success. Getting as far as the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, or (gasp!) Final Four is huge for smaller schools.

But let’s be honest, as much as it warms all of our hearts to see some 5’11” point guard from a small town in Wisconsin hit the big last second shot that wins the game, the success of the tournament is really due to two factors that pro sports know very well – gambling and television.

As soon as the bracket pairings are announced on CBS’s telecast on Selection Sunday (everything involved with the tournament requires a big name) people all across the country will begin to plot their strategy for their requisite office pools. While most pools might rely on dumb luck, filling out the brackets during March Madness requires astute knowledge and nerves of steel. There are rules that must be followed. A 12 seed always beats a number 5 seed. A number 13 almost always beats a 4. All four number top seeds never reach the Final Four in the same year.

Armed with all of this information, men and women alike will fill out multiple brackets prognosticating the rise and fall of each team over a three-week span. It’s a yearly ritual with almost as many hours put into it as preparing income tax returns. That, of course, makes it all the more frustrating when year in and year out every office pool is won by the person entered that knows the least about college basketball.

As a television property the tournament is second only to the Super Bowl. Ironically, since they no longer broadcast any of the games, it took ESPN to show the proper way to treat the orgiastic nature of the opening rounds. During the early-90’s, ESPN took over broadcasting all of the early round games that CBS didn’t want and turned it into a breakneck, all action all the time feast for the basketball junkie. Suddenly, you didn’t see the highlights of a close game; you saw the end of every tight game live. The popularity of ESPN’s coverage not only shaped the way that CBS now handles the game broadcasts but caused them to toss a lot more money into the pot to get rid of their competition.

The convergence of gambling and television means that the best possible place to be for the NCAA Tournament is in Las Vegas. During the first two weekends of the tournament, Vegas is a sports bettors paradise. From morning till night the casino sports books are alive with groups of fans sipping comped drinks and cheering different games on surrounding walls of televisions. Some cheer for their alma mater while others cheer for the team that they’ve got a C-note on – but either way you can hear the ruckus all throughout the casino. It might be the best time you can have in Sin City and that’s saying something.

That isn’t to say that the basketball itself is secondary. Quite to the contrary, the NCAA Tournament provides moments that basketball fans never forget. The 1979 championship game, featuring Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, literally changed the course of basketball. Not just college basketball, but all basketball. If there are people that don’t actually remember watching North Carolina’s Michael Jordan take the game winning shot or Georgetown’s Fred Brown throwing the ball away in the 1982 championship, then they’ve seen the highlights enough to feel as though they have. Chris Webber, for all of his fame and fortune, will never live down calling a timeout that his Michigan team didn’t have.

I personally have strong memories of single handedly stopping a cocktail party with my insistence on watching the end of a Kentucky-Duke regional final that turned into Christian Laettner’s now famous turn around last second shot. And of jumping around my living room as a kid while Houston’s Clyde Drexler put on a dunk exhibition against Louisville. Then two nights later watching crestfallen as Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State team beat my beloved Phi-Slamma-Jamma Cougars on the ultimate fluke play.

New stories are written every year. This year there’s already an ultimate Cinderella team with little Oakland (MI) University making the field with a 12-18 and highlighting the nightmare scenario that every good team in a small conference fears – having a great season wasted by a team that gets hot in the conference tournament. Come the first round of the tournament there will be a plethora of David vs. Goliath match-ups, many of which will be much closer than anyone will expect.

There are plenty of other storylines as well. How will Illinois respond to having their perfect season ended? Can the very talented North Carolina Tar Heels finally give coach Roy Williams the championship that he so openly craves? Can a smaller school like Gonzaga break through and make it all the way to the Final Four? Even if they don’t, which team will make an improbable run that absolutely no one expects, thereby ruining the bracket picks of countless millions?

In a few weeks, we’ll know where this year’s tournament ranks with those of the past but the real fun is in watching it all unfold. So get those brackets ready and let the madness begin.

(Brendon McCullin is a staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine)