Fierce And Nerdy: The Madness Has Begun
Friday, March 13, 2009 10:14
Editor’s Note: Another FierceAndNerdy.com cross-post.
March Madness is finally here!
What’s that, say you? It’s not March Madness yet! There are no brackets, no upsets, no buzzer-beaters.
Ah, but there are. Conference Tournament Week is here. And each year, the conference tournaments expand more and more both in excitement and importance, having reached that point in their evolution at which they are no longer just a mere precursor or warm-up act to the big dance but now stand as the entire first act. Selection Sunday is no longer just the kick-off of the Tournament; it has become the turning point of an extended dramatic structure.
When some school with a .500 or less winning percentage goes on a miraculous run during the conference tourney, upsetting the Number 1 seed and landing the conference’s automatic berth when they otherwise had no chance in hell of advancing to anything but the NIT (and maybe not even that), the Madness has already begun.
Case in point… on Thursday, Pitt, Kansas, Oklahoma and Clemson were all upset by vastly inferior teams. Then, in the nightcap, Big East arch-rivals Connecticut and Syracuse played a game for the ages, with the Orange upsetting the Huskies in sextuple–yes, six!–overtime.
More so than any other sport, college basketball has seen unprecedented growth over the last twenty-five years, largely because CBS realized that the NCAA Tournament was marketable specifically because some small school no one has ever heard of except for its alumni could pull off a series of upsets and go deep into the Tourney, not despite such an occurrence.
It’s a situation pretty much unique in American team sports. The college basketball tournament thrives on those upsets happening, and a deep run by a smaller program actually generates fan interest instead of dampening it. One would think the underdog phenomenon would prevail across the sports spectrum, but the ratings success of the professional leagues and Division I-A college football sadly lives and dies with the exposure and success of the big-name teams. Phillies-Rays was not a highly-rated World Series, for example (it should be noted that the Super Bowl has become such a cultural event that it is immune to the popularity of the teams playing).
Ironically, the powers-that-be at NCAA still frequently fail to divorce themselves from their big conference paychecks in awarding smaller schools more at-large berths. I’m not saying that the Selection Committee should pick a mid-major school over a Big-6 Conference school if it’s not warranted, but time and again the Committee favors the traditional powerhouses having an off year rather than the small program having a great year when, all things being equal, the selection is otherwise a toss-up. Fortunately, the automatic bid system always means there will be underdogs for whom to root… and their success puts the madness in March Madness.
2 Responses to “Fierce And Nerdy: The Madness Has Begun”
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NicholasBrandt
says:
March 13th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
The 'Cuse is loose. Go Orange!
Nate Barlow
says:
March 13th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Unbelievable game. A shame either team had to lose.