Driving The Lane: Bracket Hysteria

It’s that time of year. That glorious time of year when you get to flex your sports knowledge muscles and pick all sixty seven games of the NCAA college basketball tournament. You lay down that fresh bracket — still warm from the printer — and you begin making your picks. The college names flow from your pen with such feverish fluidity as if you’re Ralphie from A Christmas Story writing his “What I Want for Christmas” essay.

Every pick is made with absolute certainty. In your mind, you’re commenting on the great three-point shooting of team A and how team B struggled in non-conference road games. This is going to be the year. Finally, you will prove your superiority over all your friends in your bracket group. Never mind what happened last year. This year you will pick the perfect bracket. Every 12-seed over a 5-seed, every 6-seed that makes it to the Sweet Sixteen, and that one 10-seed that makes it to the Elite Eight: It’s all there. You’re bracket is perfection.

Until you begin second-guessing. Why did I pick that 13-seed over that 4-seed? That’s not going to happen. That 4-seed is obviously going to make it to the Sweet Sixteen. That’s what everyone is saying. I’ll lose out on two picks if I make that mistake. Okay, I’ll just make this one change and that will be it. 

Thus begins the snowball effect: Hair-tearing decision-making and uneasy change. Well if I make this one change, then I should probably check the rest of the bracket for other mistakes. Uh oh, I really shouldn’t have two 1-seeds losing in the Sweet Sixteen. What are the odds of that happening? But which one shouldn’t lose? I’m not sure. And why do I have a 2-seed losing in the first round? I know it happened twice last year, but that was definitely just an anomaly. It won’t happen again. Why was I so naïve when I first filled this out?

This process continues until your bracket looks like a bowling score card, filled with X’s that mark all of your previous mistakes. You begin to agonize, Why oh why did I have to do this whole bracket in pen? Always use a pencil. Pencil can be erased. Okay, well at least I think I’ve fixed everything. Now my bracket is perfect. But wait. What if my original picks were right? What if I created the perfect bracket, and I ruined it? How could I possibly live with myself knowing that I was given the ability to see into the future, only to soil it with my second-guessing? Ah, which bracket should I go with, my first one or my new one? I don’t know!

Okay, maybe you don’t have quite as hard of a time filling out a bracket as I do. This is the agony I put myself through every year. But I can never stop. I will always keep the faith that one year I will pick the perfect bracket. Some day, I will foresee an 11-seed making the final four when no one else saw it coming. I will be the guy that gets to call into SportsCenter because I’m the only person who submitted a perfect bracket on ESPN.com. Until that day, I have to keep trying.

Every year it’s a new system. Last year, I tried to incorporate my Statistics major into my bracket-filling experience. I ran a logistic regression (stats jargon) predicting wins from team statistics, such as points per game, strength of schedule, etc. Safe to say, that didn’t go so well. It turns out March Madness games are way too unpredictable for statistical modeling. This year, I think I’m going with coaches’ past tournament wins as my picking system. Go Duke!

The agony of filling out a bracket is what makes March Madness the greatest few weeks of the entire sports calendar. It makes us nervously watch games between two schools that we’ve never even heard of. We suddenly become fans of teams with names that we can’t even pronounce. It is the ultimate fan experience. Every year we play the unwinnable game of filling out brackets, and it makes us all better sports fans.