The Beauty of a Busted Bracket

One Game.

That’s how long it took before I was out of the running for Warren Buffett’s Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge.  It all seemed so possible at first.  My first two upset picks, Harvard and Pittsburgh, were well on their way to making me feel like a genius and Oregon and Syracuse were dispatching their competition with savage efficiency.  All I needed was for Ohio State to get it together and take care of this silly little team from Dayton. 

But they didn’t take care of that silly little team and with one game in the books my bracket was 0 and 1 in picks and my chances at a billion dollars evaporated as if it had never been.

In reality, it might as well have never been.  The college game has become less and less predictable as potentially great college players cut their careers shorter and shorter in favor of the NBA.  The most generous estimates on the odds of actually picking a perfect bracket in the lead up to the tournament were somewhere in the range of 7.4 billion to 1.

With the best players going one and done, every team is suseptible to the "improbable" upset.

That of course didn’t stop me from dreaming up what my life would be like if I suddenly was getting an extra 40 million dollars of Warren Buffett’s money every year (The prize money was set to be paid out in 40 million per year increments).  If I’d somehow be able to go on living my life in Brooklyn and whether or not I’d have to get a bodyguard in the wake of the frenzy of becoming the “luckiest man alive”.  How much of the money I should donate to charity annually to constitute being a philanthropist or, at the very least, a decent human being. 

It was absurd how much time I put into that bracket.  Reading everything I could find about possible upsets and likely winners.  Making picks, going back, changing picks, fully aware I was completely wasting my time.  It was all a ridiculous pipe dream, of course, but one that was too much fun not to consider the possibility.

That is what March Madness is all about, after all: pipe dreams and possibilities.  Despite the hordes of screaming fans, very few people have vested interest in any school’s success in the tournament beyond picking them in their bracket.  My own school, Providence, did manage their first tourney appearance in a decade but their time was but short as they exited after a close defeat to UNC in the first round.  Long dead are the days of UCLA dynasties and Phi Slamma Jamma juggernaut teams, the big money of the NBA has seen to that.  If anything, disdain for NCAA basketball is at an all time high as corruption seems to seep through every crevice and whole conferences cannibalize themselves in a frenzied cash grab.  But fans keep coming back every March, and they don’t need Warren Buffett to put up a billion dollars to do it.  All they need are pipe dreams, and just the slightest possibility that they could come true.

It only takes a minute to fill out a bracket.  No matter how little you know or care about the college game.  No matter how much the quality play has dropped off over the years or how “tainted” big money makes it, how imperfect the system is for finding the best team, the bracket is just too good to pass up.

Breakout players like Sabazz Napier give us a reason to keep watching after the bracket are long forgotten.

Even when it all inevitably falls apart, we’ve gained so much appreciation for what we’ve seen we can’t look away.  That is the real value of the bracket.  We play for the dream of greatness for ourselves and we watch for the dream of greatness for others.

When it is all done, we count the days until next year and the possibilities are endless once again.

The Winter Olympics?

You would think this was an easy one.  As much fun as it is to talk about, does anyone really enjoy watching curling?  More to the point, does anyone have any clue what the rules of curling are?

The Winter Olympics have about two days worth of cool and/or fun events and the rest is biathlons and stuff they don’t even bother to air on television.

I want to say the Winter Olympics are overrated.  I really do.  But the truth of it is, that aside from occasionally checking the medal tracker on ESPN because it would be kinda cool I guess if the United States finished with the most medals (which they didn’t, thanks for nothing Shaun White), I just don’t care.  I don’t care and I think most people feel the same way, which would be the very definition of the Winter Olympics being NOT overrated.

Of course, it didn’t help much that the U.S. didn’t have a real competitor this year in figure skating or that the men’s hockey team stunk it up in the medal round (the only two sports Americans care about).  The lead up to Olympics, with the anti-gayness (what will Johnny Weir wear!?) and shoddy construction were much bigger and more interesting stories than anything from the games itself.

The most talked about athlete at the Sochi Game? The Russian "president".

 

So, Winter Olympics, as we come to your closing ceremonies… or wait, did those already happen?  I honestly don’t know.  Are the Olympics even over?

Whatever, I guess you’re not overrated but that’s only because people could care less.  And I don't mean that in the serious, Puritan way, but in sarcastic, Jewish way..

Overrated: Statistics!

Remember the days when you had to had to sit on the edge of your couch to know the seeding of the NCAA tournament?  Who was going to win Best Picture at the Oscars?  Remember experiencing that massive disappointment when your presidential candidate got wrecked in the general election despite being able to blindly convince yourself that they had a real chance at winning?

Say goodbye to those days.

Now we have statistics to suck the fun and suspense out of everything that was once unsure in life.

Now, instead of arguing with your friends for hours on end over completely trivial things that none of us could possibly be sure of, all we need do is look up the stats on some website and we have absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the day.  BORING.

So, who is to blame for this?  Two groups of people no one likes:  nerds and degenerate gamblers.

Baseball fans once looked like this.

That's right, nerds and degenerate gamblers have conspired to try and remove all of the uncertainty (and fun) from the world with their "proven" methods and formulas.

The gambler's stake in this is obvious.  Bet on anything and everything, only try and devise a way to always know the outcome.  I can hardly blame them, after all, they are diseased.

The nerds are harder to defend.  I theorize that in the Star Trek-less world we currently live in, nerds have needed to find some new thing to obsess over and completely ruin for society.

First, the ruined baseball.

Now they look like this.

With the birth of sabermetrics PECOTA, VORP, ERA+, and WAR, actually watching baseball games has become little more than a formality to determine the quality of players.  Who cares if no one actually knows how these formulas actually work, what matters is that they suck fun out from where there once was so much.

You'd think destroying America's national pastime would be enough for these refugee trekkies, but they couldn't leave well enough alone.

Soon people like Nate Silver (the creator of PECOTA) were taking to the web removing all the suspense from anything even remotely political with www.fivethirtyeight.com.  Joe Lunardi was hanging around ESPN studios telling everyone who was gonna be in the NCAA tournament before the bids were announced.

At least they aren't dooming another human being to a horrible lonely existence.

Was there a single person on this planet other than David Fincher's mother who really thought that The King's Speech wasn't going to win Best Picture this year?

Now, these guys aren't completely perfect.  Lunardi missed on the placing of a few schools and Silver occasionally (though rather rarely) picks the wrong horse for a race, but long gone are the days of endless armchair conjecture and uneducated promises.

How is your average Providence College student supposed to get amped for selection sunday when he knows beyond on a shadow of a doubt that his school is a joke, thanks to the stats?  What are Sarah Palin fans going to do when she falls flat on her face after "running" for president?  Act like they didn't see it coming?

Palin for President? Someone hasn't been keeping up with their fivethirtyeight poll tracking.

Anyone with a working set of eyes and fingers can know the results before the show even starts just by pushing enter.  What are we supposed to do now?  Read!?

And the nerds have won.