For me, NCAA tournament is March sadness
- Brett Hiner: A Work in Progress
- March 19, 2024
- 1154
So here we gather again — on the eve of what has essentially become my annual donation of $10 to someone else’s college, grocery, gas or beer fund. Having never won a March Madness bracket in my lifetime, that is essentially what I am doing, donating to someone else’s cause without the charitable intent behind it.
And when I say I have never won, I mean not even close, except that one time in college in 1992, I believe, when I rode those Ohio schools to a third-place outcome. I made $5 and spent it at Taco Bell.
Typically out after the first round, I now spend the latter days of March and early April trying to convince myself, “This is the last time I am entering this stupid contest. Take that Alexander Hamilton and go buy a roll of duct tape or a Scrub-Daddy — anything that would be more productive to my daily existence than flushing that money down the toilet.”
But lo and behold, here I am, having already agreed to join four bracket pools when the seeds are announced tomorrow — $2 each to get in but $2 short of my annual March Madness limit. Hey, at least this year I am saving myself a few bucks. Can you still get anything at Taco Bell with that?
Because misery loves company, or perhaps as an attempt to make myself feel/look better when it comes to predictions, I reached out to some friends and colleagues — folks who know college basketball and some who do not.
In some cases their results and experiences mirror my own, with levels of success being relative to the number of times they have completed brackets.
Of the 43 folks who responded to my inquiries, 81.9% of them stated they have won a bracket pool at least once while 9.1% have won upward of four or more times. That leaves me in the bottom percentile, with the other 18.2% of whom have never won. One friend, who asked to remain anonymous, guesstimates he has filled out over 100 brackets in his lifetime and spent over $1,000 in doing so but has never held up the March Madness medal. I guess that makes me feel better.
More often than not, their stories of defeat make for entertaining memories.
Having won a bracket pool one time, Wooster’s head boys basketball coach Che Richardson has felt the beauty of victory, but also the spoils of defeat: “I threw my phone across the room when Duke lost to Mercer in the first round (of 2014),” he said.
A four-time winner over the years, Wooster Athletic Director Alex Mallue recalls his biggest success and failure coming in the same year. “I went 30-2 in first-round games and didn’t end up winning the bracket pool. How does that happen?” he asked.
“Smithsonian Magazine might help with the answer. In their article “The Mathematical Madness Behind a Perfect NCAA Basketball Bracket,” published in 2019, they state the odds of completing the perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. (How many numbers are even in a quintillion?)
They also said, “You have a better chance of winning the Powerball twice in a row or getting hit with a piece of space junk falling out of the sky.”
I guess when one considers that roughly 70 million brackets are filled out each year, coming in third 30-plus years ago may not be so bad, especially when one considers the first bracket pool is believed to have originated in 1977 at a bar in Staten Island. It was a $10 pool with 88 people in it, an $880 winner-take-all purse. It now exceeds over 150,000 participants with the winnings exceeding $1.5 million.
Surely in the pool's 47-year existence, there must be someone out there doing worse than me.
Along with the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat, most who partake of the annual Madness find the real joy in the personalization of the teams themselves.
“Cheering for new teams and following all the new stories is the best,” WHS intervention specialist Drew Durbin said. “Collegiate-level sports are filled with passion and competition, and March Madness pools allow the fans to embark on the journey with the teams.”
History teacher John Karamas agrees. “Cinderella stories are always great to root for in the first couple rounds,” he said.
Even with the love of rooting for the underdog, every respondent who was polled commented on the satisfaction that comes with the good-natured smack-talk, especially when the smack-talk is backed up by a five-year winning streak.
“My reservations for City Square Steakhouse have already been made for Tuesday, April 9,” Wooster resident Rachel Downs said. “When you’ve won your office pool five years in a row, it just becomes an annual celebration.”
Sadly, for me, my son claimed familial victory in the pool last year. With the madness about to start up again, I was hoping he would have forgotten that little nugget, but the cavalier confidence has kicked into high gear — enough for me to remind him that sleeping in the garage in March might also result in “madness.”
Einstein is believed to have said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Therein, I guess, lies my comfort. While I do find myself doing the same thing over and over, at least when it comes to the Madness of March, I have no expectation that my bracket results will be any different than years past. Thanks for the clarification, Albert.
Brett Hiner is in his 27th year of teaching English/language arts at Wooster High School, where he also serves as the yearbook adviser and Drama Club adviser/director. When writing, he enjoys connecting cultural experiences, pop and otherwise to everyday life. He can be emailed at workinprogessWWN@gmail.com.