EVERY MARCH Americans embark on the futile exercise of trying to predict the winners of each game in the National College Athletic Association’s basketball tournament. Choosing a perfect “bracket” is as good as impossible. There are 67 matches in all, involving 68 teams competing in seven knockout rounds over three weeks. The chances of getting them all right by random selection—including the men’s final on April 4th—are one in 9.2 quintillion.
The competition, known fondly as “March Madness”, has been around since 1939. The prelude of “Selection Sunday”, when teams’ seedings and the first-round draw are revealed, has become an event in itself. An estimated 36.5m Americans, or about 11% of the country’s population, filled out a bracket this year. Some 45m people are expected to place bets, worth a total of $3.1bn, according to the American Gaming Association. Why do so many Americans care about a college basketball tournament?
It helps that as sports go, basketball is easy to follow. Teams want to get the ball through the hoop. Granted, as in all sports, referees’ decisions can be perplexing (as in the last few minutes of TCU’s second-round defeat by Arizona). But there are few convoluted rules to confuse newcomers, as in, say, cricket or rugby union. And college sports (football as well as basketball) are far more popular in America than in Europe. As many people are watching March Madness games this year as the National Basketball Association finals last July.
But there’s more to it than that. The exercise of filling out a bracket means that the competition on the courts isn’t the only one that counts—or even the one that counts the most. Complete a bracket and you are up against your friends, family and your workmates. No matter what business you are in, your workplace probably has some kind of March Madness bracket pool in which colleagues vie to pick the most games right. Because of the sheer unpredictability of the tournament—upsets and chaotic victories abound—a complete basketball novice can win a pot of cash and a year of bragging rights.
That doesn’t deter many who know a thing or two about the game—or think they do—from elaborate efforts to beat the daunting odds. Fans’ discussions of players and teams are laden with statistics, weighing up the strength of teams’ schedules during the regular season, win percentage on the road, turnovers, free-throw percentage and more. Sports networks devote seemingly endless air-time to this science of “bracketology”.
FiveThirtyEight, a website best known for forecasting elections, has made March Madness predictions since 2011. Much like a composite of polls during an election season, the website combines six different rankings of teams and then tries to project the probability of each team advancing through the tournament. The data gurus gave last year’s champions, Baylor, a 13% chance of winning it all. This year their money was on Gonzaga, the number-one seed—who were knocked out by Arkansas on March 24th. In 2014 Berkshire Hathaway and Quicken Loans offered a prize of $1bn to anyone who could pick all 67 winners. No one won.
The popularity of bracket pools has spread beyond basketball obsessives and office rivalries into broader American pop culture—and even politics. President Barack Obama, who is among the obsessives, released his bracket every year he was in office. Donald Trump never published a bracket while he was president, but Joe Biden has reinstated the practice. He picked his alma mater, the University of Delaware, to win the men’s and women’s tournaments. Both teams were eliminated in the first round.
Bracket mania has transcended basketball, too. All manner of brackets proliferate in March, trying to determine the best meme, potato dish, Disney or Pixar film and more. The Denver Post, a newspaper, is letting readers vote on match-ups between local taco restaurants to ascertain the finest in Colorado’s capital. In 2018 Vox, a news website, taking its cue from the film “Inception”, published a (meta-)bracket to find the best pop-culture bracket. The runners and riders included: YouTubers, emo songs of the 2000s, Donald Trump scandals and, in questionable taste, wars in 1994. Don’t like basketball? Never mind: there’s a bracket for you somewhere.