Embrace the March Madness: NCAA Basketball preview.
By Alex Ferguson
Last Updated: 18/03/15 2:46pm
Alex Ferguson looks ahead to the frenzy of basketball and betting action which occurs during the 'March Madness' tournament in the US.
There are two things that are mad in March: Hares and college basketball fans.
March Madness is one of the craziest tournaments in all of sports, with over $9bn (£6.1m) estimated to be bet – both illegally and legally - on outcomes in the USA alone every year.
What happens? The NCAA Division One Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament, to give it its full and proper name, sees 64 teams, with each team given a one to 16 seeding, based on their berth.
The top four teams gets a top seed, and this moves down to minnows getting the 16 seed.
After two pairs of 'play-in' games on Tuesday and Wednesday, the first round happens this Thursday and Friday, the second round on this weekend. We take a deep breath, and then the third round is on Thursday and Friday, and the quarter-finals are on Saturday and Sunday.
The semi-finals and final – played at Lucas Oil Stadium – home of the Indianapolis Colts – are played on April 4th and 6th.
It’s an exhausting, dramatic schedule with more twists and turns than the average cobra, featuring money, unprintable language and grown me like men jumping up and down on sofas and screaming: “Did you just see that?” to no-one in particular.
And before this fun and games takes place, America bets on who’s going to be jumping on the sofa, and who’s not.
But for a lot of the time, it’s not straight-up betting on each result. It’s the business of brackets, which fill out like a Wimbledon draw, with people betting on how the whole tournament will shape up before a basketball is thrown in anger. It’s estimated that 70 million brackets will be filled in this year. 70 MILLION.
On a personal note, March Madness has been mixed for me. In 2001 when I was at Concordia University in Montreal, I walked away with the pot after betting on Duke to win it all. In 2007, my bracket between a couple of friends, Matt and Taylor cost me an expensive dinner. In 2008, Taylor was paying the bill as Matt and I gorged lobster. But every year I go in with a new hope: I am going to win bragging rights for this year. I will this year, I promise myself.
And every year – like a lot of fans out there - I spend too much sweating the small stuff. Suddenly I care about the basketball prowess of Stephen F. Austin State University – a No 12 seed - and whether they’ll beat No. 5 Utah. The pundits seem to think so. I slide between risk and risk-averse, wanting to make the pick, but worried about the bragging rights.
It’s strange, but a lot of March Madness brackets in offices haven’t been won by the type of background research that would make the MI5 proud, they’ve been won by someone who puts in their $10, buys a sheet, and fills it out there and then.
And I suspect that a lot of those offices will be pretty quiet around midday on Thursday when the first game between No.3 Notre Dame plays No.14 Northeastern kicks off the tournament proper. The talk will stop, and the fun will start flowing.
For me, this year’s investment in March Madness is going to be really difficult. EVERYONE’S going to be betting on the University of Kentucky, who have been unbeaten all season long and are looking to make history by finishing the whole season without a blemish on their record. They are the most talented team in the bracket, and it’s not even that close.
The Wildcats can drown you defensively, and even if they’ve given you a glimmer of hope with five minutes to go in the second half, they suddenly hit another gear, and you’re left gasping for air and asking: "What in the hell happened?"
That means that we’re all in a bit of a quandry. Who else is going to make the semi-finals (called the “Final Four”)? Villanova, Duke, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kansas and Virginia have all been touted to fill those spots, with whispers about the multi-talented and multi-exciting Iowa State to maybe make it, too. Of course, one of the spots is taken up, but the other three is a real pain.
But despite all of my Kentucky talk, everyone – including me and my wallet – loves the upset. It’s the romantic in us. Little school beats big school – like No 15 Mercer did to No 2 Duke last year – and everyone celebrates. It’s the romance of the tournament, right?
