There is a lot wrong with college sport in America, but the NCAA’s end-of-season basketball tournament is all but perfect.
King John doesn’t get much credit in Ireland. Lord of Ireland from 1177 until his death in 1216, he’s the man responsible for beginning to put the county structure in place in this country. Unwittingly, he would ultimately set us on the road to 32 counties, a gift from the ages when it comes to organising a sport tournament.
Of course the GAA have never taken full advantage of this gift and an open draw of 32 teams facing off in a straight knockout event will never happen, at least not as the primary prize in Gaelic games.
Most other sporting bodies have to manufacture a workable number of teams in some fashion, and even then they make a balls of it, making it too big (we’re looking at you Euro 2016), too drawn out (the two-group stage Champions League idea or the Rugby World Cup) or almost impossible to get knocked out of (hello Europa League).
But the NCAA, the body responsible for college sports in the US have, by a mixture of luck and design, crafted the most perfect event in sport; the NCAA Basketball tournament (AKA The Big Dance or The Tourney).
To be honest, it is a miracle. The NCAA are the body responsible for the reprehensible treatment of players in college, who can’t get a stick of gum for free for fear of losing their scholarships, they created the woefully inadequate Bowl system for college football and they do all this while raking in huge money off the backs of amateur players.
In fact, they got the ‘Tourney’ so right it is almost hilarious. Essentially it is a 64 team straight knockout, run off in four regions of 16 over about three weeks. In recent years they have added four play-in games so it is now a 68-team tourney but those games can be ignored. The real stuff starts in Round 2, when 64 teams begin their bid to win six games in a row to become national champion.
Six games. It just sounds so enticing, so simple. Teams are seeded, and assigned sections, both of which cause controversy annually. The big beef this year is that last year’s champions Louisville are only fourth seeds, thanks to a supposedly lack lustre regular season. But regardless of whether you are ranked first or 16th by the powers that be, win six games and you are the kings of college basketball.
The bracket, the beautiful diagram that shows every game, has become an American institution. It is estimated that 50 million brackets will be filled in this year., with many people doing more than one as they compete in various office pools for cash. Barack Obama does his on camera each year (he’s not great at it, but he did pick the winner in 2009) and while winning ESPN’s competition for the most correct results nets you $10,000, others are offering even bigger prizes. You can have a go yourself right here.
Warren Buffett, the multi billionaire, is offering anyone who gets all 63 results in this year’s tournament correct $1billion. The odds? Just one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Makes picking the Grand National winner seem like a piece of cake. If you fancy your chances, you can enter here.
It has never been done in the 16 years that ESPN have been running an online bracket competition and it almost certainly won’t be done this year either, because built in to the tournament is almost guaranteed unpredictability.
You have young players, under huge pressure, trying to win the most important games of their lives in front of big crowds. Favourites will wilt, small fry will grow in confidence and sometimes a superstar drags his team singlehandedly to glory. Magic Johnson led Michigan State to the tile, beating Larry Bird’s Indiana in the final in 1979 and Anthony Davis, now a star with New Orleans, did a similar job for Kentucky in 2012.
This year’s tournament has a couple of potential superstars to keep an eye on. Canadian Andrew Wiggins is the top man at Kansas and will definitely go high in the NBA draft later this year. Compared to Michael Jordan before the season started (we know, we know), he has improved as the season has ticked on and could really become a hot property with a dominant display over the next few weeks.
Duke’s Jabari Parker is another player to watch out for, as is Kentucky’s Julius Randle, but the overall excitement and tension of every single game is what makes the tournament so entertaining, not the stars.
By dint of the seedings, everyone can see who the favourite for each game is, so you can root for the underdog without any prior knowledge, and with ESPN providing wall-to-wall coverage on their UK channel, it is easy to dip in and out and get behind a minnow, something we all like to do.
The quality of basketball will vary, but for raw sporting uncertainty it is hard to beat. Just imagine the GAA championship as a straight 32 team direct knockout. Ignore the issues that would create that are too myriad to mention here, just imagine how exciting it would be. That’s what ‘The Big Dance’ is for basketball fans so if you love the sport, this is TV heaven.
And if you are just a sports fan, it is hard not to become intoxicated by it too. Nothing is perfect. Even our old friend King John, who signed the Magna Carta, is best known these days as the bad guy in the Robin Hood flicks. But the NCAA basketball tournament is the nearest thing we have to perfection in sport.
Make sure you don’t miss out. And if you win the cash, don’t be a stranger.
