Pure madness

When I sit down to write this column, knowing full well that I am going to criticize March Madness and the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, I wonder if I’m just an idiot. Or, if not an idiot, then at least someone who is no fun at all, someone whose feelings about athletics are perhaps closer to hate than love.

I’m a crank, basically.

But please understand up front: I love March Madness. I think it’s a blast, a basketball carnival. I love filling out brackets, I love Selection Sunday, I love that basketball on a Thursday morning is an entirely legitimate excuse to not work very hard. I love it as a spectacle and hype machine. March Madness pulls in nonfans, crowns a champion, supersedes all events that lead up to it. To the majority of Americans—whether they are superfans or staunch anti-sport zealots—the NCAA tournament represents the entire sport of college basketball. Except it’s not really anything like college basketball.

For approximately 20 games every year, NCAA basketball is played in conferences. Teams play the same group of opponents with the same coaches and the same styles of play in the same arenas in the same general geographic areas with the same conference-specific officials and with access to roughly the same recruiting pool. College basketball programs are built around these yearly certainties with the understanding that the ability to compete in these very specific constraints dictates success.

But then comes March Madness. The ever-growing list of teams “fortunate” enough to be selected for participation are ranked arbitrarily and shipped off to disparate parts of the country to play in a single-elimination tournament against programs of widely varied styles, officiated with no game-to-game consistency by a hodgepodge of refs from different conferences. The winner of this weird event—one that doesn’t bear much resemblance to the meat-and-potatoes of the sport—is, of course, the champion of college basketball.

Now, you could argue a lot of the same stuff about the championships of most sports. The Super Bowl has the same casual pop-culture appeal and single-elimination format. Ditto for the Olympics, in which a sport can be distilled down to a single 10-second race that happens once every four years. You would be totally right to argue that. And, honestly, we should complain about those things, too, because they devalue a big part of something that sportswriters like me want to convince you is really important. In the NFL playoffs, as in the NCAA tournament, a one-and-done format means that fluky things can happen, and a worse team can beat a better team. It happens all the time. The Olympics are even worse in this regard—athletes dedicate a lifetime of training and sacrifice to a goal that can be undone by a single moment of less-than-perfection. Suddenly, they are not the best, even if they are.

But the NCAA tournament is much worse. Olympic athletes are probably the purist kind of athlete and, in that sense, they are vastly more important to the high-minded possibilities of sport. But their sports become important because of the Olympics; the event gives the world an opportunity to celebrate them, so they are subservient to it. And at least in the NFL, all of the teams participating in the playoffs have earned their way there through an entire season of quality performances. Their position in the bracket and the locations of their games are determined by a consistent rubric to which all teams are equally accountable. The same crews of officials are working together to officiate the game in exactly the same way they always do. Achieving results over the course of a season matters, and thus the season matters.

That’s not really the case in men’s college basketball. The tournament bracket is seeded, and a team’s body of work is evaluated by the committee doing the seeding. Not all equivalent seeds are created equally, and conferences aren’t created equally; a number-one-seed Gonzaga team from the West Coast Conference is not better than a four-seed Michigan team from the Big Ten Conference. That’s a subjective statement, and you can disagree with me, but such is the nature of college basketball. A single-elimination tournament in which anything can happen is probably not the best place to settle the debate.

The most alarming issue introduced by a tournament like this is the fact that the season doesn’t carry much weight. We start talking about “the bubble” and Bracketology around Christmastime, and teams spend the year just trying to build a resume strong enough to get in. Why would good teams, assured of their place in the Big Dance, sweat the regular season? Why would bad teams, whose only hope for a tourney invite comes from winning their conference tournaments, care at all until the tournament starts? Why should we, as fans, pay attention until there’s something on the line? And how can I, or any sportswriter like me, possibly convince you that sports are important to fans if they aren’t even important to athletes?

March Madness is exciting, and maybe the most important aspect of college basketball is the way in which its tournament brings us all together for a few weeks, bonding over something we don’t get to experience during the other 11 months of the year. And when it’s a beautiful Easter weekend in Portland, as it is outside my window as I write this, the whole mess is put into proper perspective at the frivolous end of the spectrum.

But I’m a crank, and I wish it mattered a little more.