March Madness

So how is your bracket doing?

To anyone else outside of America, this would seem like a crazy question and would be followed with the response, "what the hell are you talking about?" But that question can only mean one thing here, it's that time of the year. It's that time of the year when hoards of people join office pools, slow down internet servers across the country and cuss more than they ever have at the television, all for college basketball. It's that time when the pencil (or pen) meets the paper and average people's lives are being put on the line in hopes that a 12-seed will take down that 5-seed.

There are so many combinations and possibilities in each bracket that it can cause someone's head to explode with statistics. What is it about "March Madness" that brings out the inner fan in every American, not just sports fans. College basketball during this month can cause rifts between families and believe it or not, it is the number one cause for divorce in America. Okay, I made that part up, but harmless pride competitions between family members involving brackets can cause the most heated disputes that are sometimes worth of being televised on Jerry Springer.

As the games are being played over the next couple of weeks, bracketologists (members of society who partake in the bracket filling festivities) will take off work and lock themselves in their basements, surrounded by 8 television screens, each one playing a different game. As the games play out, they have all 42 brackets they filled out lined up in front of them, using bunson burners and schematics to score each one, prediciting what will happen in each game, down to the number of sweat drops that will fall off of the center's nose in the 4th quarter.

Now...this has all been exaggerated to the fullest extent, but for those who take this March Madness seriously, they know I'm not that far-fetched with this example. The NCAA Tournament, as Kelly put in her blog, create maniacs out of the most docile people and can even "make grown men cry". I am guilty of this, sitting on a futon the past three days following NCAA action, not sure which team to root for since I have 20 brackets currently filled out. I get asked which team I want to win and i can't legitmately answer because I filled out half my brackets with one team and half with the other.

With games getting down the wire, I find myself rooting for the underdog, even though them winning would destroy every one of my brackets. But March Madness has a certain control on our lives that persuades us to fill out these brackets, even if we have never watched college basketball before. We are three days into the tournament and people are already hanging up their Syraucse basketball shorts from 1984 and calling it quits.

So how is your bracket doing?

Oh and by the way, since they keep adding teams to the tournament, recently expanding the field to 65 instead of 64 to include one extra "play-in" game, this video gave me a good laugh at what the NCAA Tournament could become.