The beauty of brackets
My March Madness picks, and brackets as art
Thursday and Friday are my favorite days of the sports year. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament kicks off* with 16 games each day, from just after noon to well after midnight. Sometimes four games are going on at once, and you keep flipping from channel to channel** and upset to upset, with one briefly sacred piece of paper in your hands.
The bracket.
*Technically, the tournament begins with play-in games Tuesday and Wednesday, but nobody counts those except fans of those schools and degenerate gamblers.
**There needs to be a German word for the angst of trying to find TruTV on your cable lineup when this is the only time of the year most of us ever watch TruTV. Voice-activated remotes and streaming services that fetch the games for you have eased the pain. But I kind of miss the search. It was like finding a silver dollar in the sand at the beach.
I try not to have too many rules in life. But I do have a few for March Madness.
One bracket only. Don’t enter a bracket under your toddler’s name in a pool to hedge your bets. Have the courage of your convictions.
If you don’t pick at least three upsets in the first round, you’re a communist.
Unless there is serious money involved, never take more than 30 minutes to fill out your bracket.
Never enter a pool where there is serious money involved.
If you wager any money based on MY picks, you’re as dumb as a sack of hammers.
Having said that, here you go:
I’m not sure how easy it is to see those picks on a phone … but it’s not like they’re the Ten Commandments or anything.
The point is, just squint and look at the brackets themselves. There’s something soothing about them. They impose a bit of symmetry on our lopsided world.
People love to slot things into brackets, and they love to argue about the brackets other people create. The other day somebody posted a Best College Towns bracket on Twitter and I was OUTRAGED that Athens, Georgia — home of my alma mater and clearly the best college town in America — was given a lowly #12 seed. I was ready to call for a congressional investigation.
Unless you do it in a cold-hearted way — and what’s the fun in that? — the brackets end up reflecting your values. A lot of people will have Duke going all the way this year because, in Mike Krzyzewski’s last season as coach, that’s the best story. A lot of people who are sick of Duke will have them going out early because that’s THEIR best story.
My story is this: I never win a March Madness pool. I won’t win this year either. I didn’t plan to have three SEC teams in the final eight, but I went to an SEC school, so there you go. I pick way too many upsets. I have South Dakota State going to the Sweet 16 when I can’t tell you a single thing about the team or even the school. (Wait, are they the Jackrabbits? Yes they are!)
It’s fun to pick upsets because it’s such a rush when the team you picked pulls it off. It’s satisfying to make that little circle around your winners. Even when you cross out the losers, it somehow adds to the art of the bracket. Each one becomes its own little blackout poem.
Maybe I’m overthinking it*, but you can see how our lives play out in the way the brackets play out. We carefully set things up the way we think they’re going to go … and then the unexpected happens, and your plans turn into ashes. If you look back at your life story, maybe it’s a never-ending trip through brackets of one kind or another, trying time and again to survive and advance.
*That would’ve been a good name for this Substack — “Maybe I’m Overthinking It.”
At the end of the tournament, though, I never remember how my brackets did. I remember Harold “The Show” Arceneaux beating North Carolina, and the Duke-Kentucky classic (a/k/a the Christian Laettner Game), and Georgia’s run to the Final Four in ‘83, and N.C. State’s miracle title that same year, and Maryland-Baltimore County over Virginia, and Gordon Hayward coming within inches of making the greatest shot of all time.
The brackets are what Hollywood calls the McGuffin — the device that triggers the story. The story is the games. They’re the real pieces of art. And if this is art you love, the next couple of days are a dream.
I agree on doing one main bracket, but I do one additional coin-flip bracket that is always pure mayhem. Heads higher seed advances, tails lower seed goes through. It's the easiest way to get rid of all those #1 seeds early.
I've learned never to pick Gonzaga to win it all. I picked them last year, so they'll probably win it this year. I never get it right, but I picked Kentucky this year.