Calinger: NCAA bracketology from a non-basketball fan
By J.W. CALINGER
ISL Correspondent
I’ve never been a big fan of college basketball, but even I find something to celebrate when the Big Dance rolls around every year. The unique nature of the tournament, with its Cinderella stories and the constant guessing and second-guessing, makes it fun to watch, even if I rarely watch a game.
For one thing, the tournament reminds me a great deal of the way I have some friends I see exactly once a year, but for that one day or couple of days – usually when I’m on vacation or at some sort of festival – we’re the dearest of pals. It’s the same way when people are filling out brackets, and there’s one school or another that people dearly love for a week or two, and about which they don’t give a flying fig the rest of the year.
I didn’t always understand this, of course. I remember a time about a decade ago when I was listening to my co-workers throw names around, and I asked: Who the flip are these Godzilla people? And Alpo? Isn’t that a brand of dog food?
No, Dubs, it’s GONZAGA. They’re in California somewhere. And VALPO is short for Valparaiso.
What’s a team from Chile doing in the tournament?
No, no, they’re from Indiana.
I still remember a time when I was in DC during the tournament, and I told some folks sitting next to me at the bar that I was from Omaha. They said: Hey, isn’t that where Creighton is?
Why, yes. Do you know someone from there?
Oh, no. They’re just in the tournament.
Again, it’s just like seeing old friends or making new ones. Best of all, these pals actually have a shot at winning. Most major professional sports have a best-of-seven tournament, and even college baseball has a double-elimination contest – but in college basketball, it’s win or go home every time. There’s no losing the first game and coming back. So, if a dinky little place like LaSalle is better than Godz – I mean, Gonzaga on a given night, they’re going on, and Gonzaga students will have to settle for going to a nice school in California.
When players are underdogs, they’re underdogs, no matter how different the students at the school or players on the team are from us. In some convoluted way, their playing gives hope to each of us who want to overcome the odds. I can’t think of a school whose students are more different from me, and possessed of more material advantage, than Harvard, but when they beat New Mexico, they represented the little guys, maybe for the first time in their entire lives. Best of all, upsets happen every year, unlike in bowl games, in which we see Boise State beat Oklahoma once a decade, if we’re lucky.
On the other hand, you have the Duke Blue Devils, of whom I think as the New York Yankees of college basketball – they wear blue and while, their fans are obnoxious, they have all the advantages, and they usually win a lot of games – and even people who don’t give that flying fig I mentioned earlier care whether they win or lose. Some people want them to win; more people want them to lose, but everyone cares.
Now, I have gotten into the tournament a couple of times. One time was when I hoped the Ohio State basketball team would take some sort of revenge on the Florida Gators, a few months after Florida beat the Buckeyes for the national championship in football. That, of course, didn’t happen. Yet another time, I was in DC – this was back in ’96 – and I was cheering the hometown Georgetown Hoyas against Massachusetts. Suddenly, I saw a high school friend playing in the Georgetown band. At that moment, I realized that if Georgetown lost, she’d fly home, and I’d have a shot at a coffee date with her. I instantly became a UMass fan. UMass won, we had coffee the next night, and I’ve been a casual Minutemen fan ever since. It goes to show that even for people who don’t care about basketball, the Big Dance can have some sort of meaning.
That said, the one thing I never have persuaded myself to do is make predictions. Friends have tried to bring me into their pools, of course. I’ve protested that I don’t know enough about college basketball to make an educated guess, to which they respond: Dubs, that really doesn’t make a difference. You have as much of a chance at winning as anyone else. I used to think they just wanted to take my entry fee, but from what I’ve heard, these friends of mine were on the money, pardon the expression.
I only know a few rules. Number 12 beating number 5 is the most likely upset there is (it’s happened three out of four times this year, I’ve noticed), and Duke probably is going to the Final Four. Numbers 1 and 2 always win at least the first game. That’s about it. Oh, one more: Geography is irrelevant. Minnesota is in the South bracket this year, California is in the East, and Ole Miss is in the West. No wonder Europeans laugh at us for our geographic illiteracy.
I probably won’t watch many games themselves. There literally is too much excitement packed into a game. There’s scoring all the time, and no matter how far ahead a team pulls, the other team almost always manages to catch up – in those ways, college basketball is the polar opposite of soccer. I’d just as soon watch the last five minutes of every game, seeing as how games usually are tied, or pretty close, with five minutes to go. Best of all, there usually is plenty of time for bathroom breaks or texting during those last five minutes.
Even so, I probably will follow the tournament. I don’t have to watch La Salle beat Kansas State to know what it means, and watching Dick Vitale go crazy while going over the highlights is fine entertainment, in and of itself. I think I’ll enjoy watching how the brackets go – unless Duke wins; that will kind of suck.
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