Last week, the men’s NCAA basketball tournament started, aka “March Madness,” and everyone has filled out their brackets and started studying other schools basketball teams more intensely than they studied for their midterms.
Everybody always believes they’ve filled out “the perfect bracket” and justify their picks for the most random reasons.
There’s always the friend who all of a sudden becomes a genius when it comes to college basketball, even though they’re the last person who you assume would know anything.
He’ll fail every class, but when it comes to college basketball he’ll pick the biggest upset as if it were obvious.
“Come on dude, if you knew anything you would’ve known Northern Iowa was going to beat Kansas. Brian Haak’s been playing basketball since he was three with his dad every day after preschool, and if you ever studied Northern Iowa’s practice tapes (like any normal sports fan) you would’ve known they’d developed a specific zone for Kansas’ offense. God, where have you been?”(Class maybe?)
Even better, if it’s not the kid whose been preparing for this year’s tournament ever since last year’s ended, it’s the person who knows absolutely nothing at all about basketball who ends up winning the entire thing.
Someone like your friend’s girlfriend who decided, “She wanted to play too,” ends up winning the whole tournament based on the most ridiculous picks.
“Claire how’d you ever predict St. Mary’s would beat Villanova in the 2nd round?”
“Well, back at catholic school I had this really nice teacher named St. Mary who I liked, and when I saw the team Villanova, the beginning of the name kind of looks like ‘villain’ and that’s bad, so I was like ‘St. Mary’s is definitely better than a villain!’ isn’t that funny how I was right?!”
“Wow, hilarious. What about Northern Iowa over Kansas, how’d you pick that?”
“Purple and yellow looks cooler than blue and red!”
However you chose to pick the outcome of the tournament, whoever’s made a bracket becomes obsessed with monitoring every game being played at any time during the day. Just because you’re going to class doesn’t mean you can’t watch the game!
In every class, there are a few kids in the back on their laptops watching games on mute. It’s easy to tell their watching the games because every few minutes they struggle to hold back their reactions from whatever just happened.
Unless a student is doing a quick celebratory fist pump because their teacher just explained how the world’s AIDS rate continues to rise, their definitely watching a game.
If you’re interested in watching the game too, just sit next to the kid with the laptop and pretend you’re reading over his notes with him by continually nodding and randomly saying words like “oh I get it” or “yea that makes sense” so the teacher believes your actually doing work.
When you get back to the dorm and start watching the games, that’s when the real fun starts. With so many friends coming together, it’s just natural that people think, “hey, we should probably be drinking right now!”(Because things aren’t fun unless you’re drunk, obviously).
That’s when ridiculous drinking games are created based on things happening in the games.
“Ok, the rules are whenever players on the bench show a reaction that’s one shot, if a player debates the ref’s call, that’s two shots, if a head coach storms up and down the court shouting at the players that’s three shots, and whenever the commentators say ‘basketball’ that’s four.”
Three minutes into the first half of the game you pass out and wake up in the hospital after getting your stomach pumped. (But now you get to watch the game from a hospital bed in a private room! Win!) Also, “March Madness” is the only time of year where every single one of your friends becomes psychic. I’m talking about being alone in your room watching a game and a big play happens and you can call anyone of your friends and start off saying, “Dude did you just see…”
And before you can even get it out they’ll respond, “Yea I know! That was ridiculous man I’ve been watching the whole thing!”
“I know, right! Purdue is playing out of their minds right now! Hold on I’m getting another call… Yea man I’m watching it right now its nuts! Wait what? No not the ‘Desperate Housewives’ finale, the Purdue game…”
Even with people you don’t know, during “March Madness” everybody shares the same mentality. If someone walks into you’re class late, you can say, “what’s the score?” and without questioning what you’re talking about they’ll respond, “65-70 with two minutes left.”
It even gets to the point where if I’m in my room studying, (which I totally do) if I hear a loud yell from a room down the hall, I’ll immediately turn my TV on to see something big just happened in a game.
So good luck to everybody who filled out a bracket, and remember if you win your pool, don’t go around rubbing it in your friend’s faces. In fact, try not to even see your friends for the next week. No matter what, as long as you won everybody else in the pool is going to hate you for a good week or so. Just remember, “This tournament takes no skill, you just got ridiculously lucky, you don’t know anything about college basketball.”
John Jacobs can be reached at jjacobs@ut.edu.