Every March, we lie to ourselves.
We stare at the blank NCAA bracket like it’s a sacred puzzle, thinking: This is my year. We run numbers, watch highlight reels, read endless predictions from “experts,” and still, without fail, chaos ensues. The twelfth seed beats the fifth seed. A buzzer beater crushes our hopes. That one friend who picked teams based on mascots is somehow leading the pool. But let’s be honest, March Madness is not about accuracy, it’s about embracing the madness.
Every year millions of people spend hours researching statistics, listening to experts, and studying player stats only to find that their bracket failed once again. That’s the special thing about March Madness. It’s based on unpredictability, and no matter how much research you do, you can’t predict the unpredictable. The numbers don’t say otherwise. The chance of getting a perfect bracket is one in 9.2 quintillion (one quintillion is one followed by eighteen zeroes). I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a perfect bracket, but it’s pretty close.
On paper, March Madness seems to all make sense. The first-seeds were dominant all season, the eighth seeds had injury issues, and the sixteenth seeds couldn’t win the big games. But logic doesn’t play in March; emotion, adrenaline, and nineteen year olds with something to prove do. Analysts and statisticians can give us three-point percentages, but they can’t predict if a random guy from Oakland is going to hit ten threes in a game or if a team is going to shoot 1-15 from the three-point line. Then there’s that twelfth seed who strolls into the elite eight like it’s nothing. That kind of team is known as a Cinderella team and every year they turn our brackets upside down. From George Mason’s Final Four run in 2006 as the thirteenth seed, to Saint Peters reaching the Elite Eight in 2022 as the fifteenth seed, Cinderella teams come out of nowhere and wreak havoc every year. They weren’t on your radar, or anyone’s radar for that matter, but all of a sudden they are everyone’s favorite underdog. You didn’t pick them. I didn’t pick them. No one picked them. And that’s why this tournament owns us every single year, year after year. By the end of the first round, most brackets are burning piles of regret and disbelief. The only thing keeping you alive is that maybe your one correct pick could make it to the final four. That’s the key: it’s not about being right, it’s about believing that you might be.
What makes March Madness differ from all other tournaments is its unpredictability. In an NFL playoff game, experts have a pretty good idea of who’s going to win, but in March, no one knows. Let’s take a look at the illusion of seeding, the tiny number next to a team’s name that is supposed to guide us through the chaos. As discussed above, these numbers fail to do their job every year. NCAA seeding is basically guessed by twelve people who watch a lot of basketball. They try their best, but they are working from only a small sample of games, and most teams don’t even play each other. For example a fifth seed from a small conference is less battle-tested than an eleventh seed from a power conference. Then there’s the chaos element. One player could get injured, one could have an off night, one could make ten three-pointers. You just don’t know. That’s why your safe pick is eliminated in the first round. We tried to pick right, but didn’t succeed because those little numbers lied right to our faces.
So why do we come back? What makes this tournament different from all others? No matter what happened a year prior, everyone’s still studying the stats, full of hope that their bracket will be the one. We come back every year because the madness hooks us, not despite the unpredictability but because of it. There is something irresistible about the hope that this year we might finally get it right. We crave the rush when a buzzer beater drops and that feeling of calling an upset that no one else saw coming, but above all, we crave that shared chaos as we all sit in disbelief.
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