For college basketball fans everywhere, March is the one of, if not the, most glorious times of the year. It is March Madness, those hallowed three weeks every fan from San Diego to South Carolina dreams about. Within those three weeks, legends are made, hearts are broken, tears are shed, big shot after big shot is made, but most of all, brackets are destroyed.
Brackets. Almost every college basketball fan, and many who aren’t fans, have them. People enter their brackets into office pools and online to sites like espn.com. Before the tournament starts, everyone is sure that they picked the right winners and more importantly the right upsets. However, people are usually wrong with their picks. The people with the brackets typically are not the so called experts on Sportscenter who have spent the whole season watching college basketball. No, the best brackets are picked by people like office secretaries who picked Ohio over Georgetown because Ohio has green jerseys and green is the color of the sweater that their dog Sergeant Whiskers used to wear.
Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. I have grown up around basketball my entire life. My dad used to be the head coach of Concordia. We can tell you why every team loses, we just can’t pick the right ones. We go online, scour teams’ point differential and other statistics that prove to be meaningless. We read all of the “expert’s” commentary. Yet for all of our hard work, out of our entire family, our combined bracket is in last place out of family. That’s right; the most basketball knowledgeable people in the family are losing to my mom, brother, and sister. My sister is in first place, and that’s not even the worst of it.
She probably couldn’t tell you one current college basketball player. To make things even more depressing, she picked “Boiler,” not Baylor, to win several rounds. She asked if “Javier” won instead of Xavier. There is no rational explanation for her picks, yet she still is destroying my dad and me.
My sister has not watched a single game of college basketball before March Madness. Now, she is engrossed in it. During the first round while we were on break and she still had school, she would text me asking for score updates. She stands and yells at the TV just like the rest of us. Therein lies the beauty of March Madness. It takes people who are ordinarily not big fans of the sport and turns them into yelling, screaming lunatics like any other diehard fan. It gives people who didn’t know Northern Iowa was even a school a chance to enjoy the game as much as the one person who has been cheering for Northern Iowa their entire life. March Madness brings people of all walks of life together because of the simplest of things—a bracket.
Brackets. Almost every college basketball fan, and many who aren’t fans, have them. People enter their brackets into office pools and online to sites like espn.com. Before the tournament starts, everyone is sure that they picked the right winners and more importantly the right upsets. However, people are usually wrong with their picks. The people with the brackets typically are not the so called experts on Sportscenter who have spent the whole season watching college basketball. No, the best brackets are picked by people like office secretaries who picked Ohio over Georgetown because Ohio has green jerseys and green is the color of the sweater that their dog Sergeant Whiskers used to wear.
Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. I have grown up around basketball my entire life. My dad used to be the head coach of Concordia. We can tell you why every team loses, we just can’t pick the right ones. We go online, scour teams’ point differential and other statistics that prove to be meaningless. We read all of the “expert’s” commentary. Yet for all of our hard work, out of our entire family, our combined bracket is in last place out of family. That’s right; the most basketball knowledgeable people in the family are losing to my mom, brother, and sister. My sister is in first place, and that’s not even the worst of it.
She probably couldn’t tell you one current college basketball player. To make things even more depressing, she picked “Boiler,” not Baylor, to win several rounds. She asked if “Javier” won instead of Xavier. There is no rational explanation for her picks, yet she still is destroying my dad and me.
My sister has not watched a single game of college basketball before March Madness. Now, she is engrossed in it. During the first round while we were on break and she still had school, she would text me asking for score updates. She stands and yells at the TV just like the rest of us. Therein lies the beauty of March Madness. It takes people who are ordinarily not big fans of the sport and turns them into yelling, screaming lunatics like any other diehard fan. It gives people who didn’t know Northern Iowa was even a school a chance to enjoy the game as much as the one person who has been cheering for Northern Iowa their entire life. March Madness brings people of all walks of life together because of the simplest of things—a bracket.
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