The Time Is Nigh

Dear Avid Reader,

The time has come. The most exciting time of the year.

March Madness

Some of you may not know what March Madness is. I will enlighten you.

What Are You Talking About?

March Madness is a term applied to a collegiate basketball tournament. There is an organization called the NCAA. It is comprised of over a thousand schools. These schools are placed in divisions based on size. The biggest schools are placed in Division 1-A. There are 334 of these schools.

These 334 schools are further divided into Conferences. There are 32 Conferences within Division 1-A. Each of the Conferences have varying numbers of member schools. Membership is usually based loosely on regions of America, such as the PAC-10 Conference being made up of schools that are along the Pacific Coast and members of the SEC being made up of schools located in the southeastern part of the country.

With such a large body of schools, it is hard to determine who the best basketball team is nationally. In order to figure this out, the NCAA holds a tournament to determine the best basketball team in the country. This tournament is sometimes called March Madness. Why is it "madness", I'll tell you.

It's maddening because of the scale. The tournament is played by 65 teams. 65 teams! It's HUGE!

The Tournament Selection Committee makes the field up by first including the winners of each conference's tournament (excluding the Ivy League which doesn't have a tournament). These are called automatic bids. The Selection Committee then decides of the remaining 85 schools, who are the best 33? These are called at-large bids.

And this is where a lot of controversy takes place. While there are a lot of ESPN analysts that will yell and proclaim that one school was unjustly excluded or another school was foolishly included, most of this is ignored. The fact that the top 19% of the eligible teams get in the tourney removes the argument that potentially deserving teams are left out. Arguing over who should be ranked as the 65th best team and who is the 66th best team is essentially meaningless. So long as the really good teams get in (read the top 20 or 25), no one cares about the teams that limp in.

Another argument starter is the seeding of the teams. All 65 teams are given a rank from 1 (the highest) to 16 (the lowest and there are five teams given this rank). These ranks are called seeds. The idea being that the teams rated a 1 should have the easier path to the championship than those ranked lower than them. The field is then divided into four brackets and the games are arranged thusly:

1 vs 16
8 vs 9

5 vs 12
4 vs 13

3 vs 14
6 vs 11

7 vs 10
2 vs 15

The winner of the 1 vs 16 game will play the winner of the 8 vs 9 game and so on until there is only one team left from this bracket. The winner of this bracket will go on to play the winner from one of the other three brackets and so on until there is one champion.

The initial placement of the teams also causes ESPN analysts to curse and yell, but again this argument is usually forgotten after a few days. The idea of the tournament is that the champion must win all of their games. If a team loses, then they lost and they are not the champion. The "philosophy of the scoreboard" prevails.

So now we get down to the nitty gritty. What is the big deal? Why are so many people tuning into this tournament? The reason is because of a wonderful and awesome game that everyone plays. We'll call this game "Pick 'em".

In Pick 'em, a player tries to predict the course of the tournament. In essence, the player tries to accurately predict the outcome of the tournament's 63 games before any of them are ever played. This may seem mountainous at first, but in reality, with the help of computers, the game takes only a few minutes of figuring. Here's out it works.

Let's look at the bracket from above. Let's say that Duke is ranked #1, Holy Cross #16, Arkansas #8, and Cincinnati #9. Let's say, for whatever reason, you pick Duke to win its game over Holy Cross and Cincy to win over Arkansas. You now have Duke facing Cincy in the second round. So you decide to pick Duke over Cincy. You now have Duke heading into the third round. Let's say that based on some of your other picks, you have Duke facing #4 N. C. State in the third round. You decide that N.C. State wins this match-up and proceeds in to the fourth round. This process continues until you pick the final game and a champion.

Now if your picks end up happening, then you will win points. You receive 1 point for an accurate 1st round pick, 2 for a second round pick, 4 for a third round pick, 8 for the fourth and so on until you reach 32 points for a correct champion pick. In the earlier example, if your picks were right you'd get 1 for Duke over Holy Cross, 1 for Cincy over Arkansas, 2 for Duke over Cincy, and 4 for N.C. State over Duke for a total of 1+1+2+4 = 8 points.

The ultimate goal is to accumulate more points than whomever you are playing against. This type of scoring favors accurate later round picks and championship picks. So picking your champion is the most important pick, as are your Final Four teams.

But if your picks end up not hapening, then you will not get any points. And if have planned a team to go very far into the toruney and they end up losing early on, it could be disastrous for your overall score.

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