Chip Shot: it's time to dance!
March 20, 2021 at 3:02 a.m.
Chip Shot: it's time to dance!
By Chip Davenport-
Something was different Thursday afternoon. My workday was full, so the obvious difference didn’t occur to me until I finished a project in between some afternoon meetings. The NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, the Round of 64, wasn’t taking place Thursday afternoon.
The Round of 64 phase of the tournament tends to start the third Thursday of March each year following a play-in tournament of four teams usually vying for 12th and 16th seeds on Tuesday and Wednesday.
College basketball, like many other sports over the last twelve months, has experienced post-season modifications. Even the IHSAA boys’ basketball finals dates were moved due to the availability of Indianapolis basketball venues already committed to the tournament.
The Round of 64 begins Friday afternoon, instead. Thus, ends a decades-long string of NCAA tournament opening round Thursdays, the launch of March Madness!
The NCAA tournament does nothing… well… almost nothing for me anymore!
If a Cinderella team makes the Elite Eight or the Final Four, all I think about is the television ratings decline the upstart program is going to cause because of a major power with assured big television ratings like Kansas or Gonzaga, for example, has been eliminated before Sweet 16 weekend.
What about the opening round, you ask? The excitement of a 16-seed giving a 1-seed fits?
If such is the case, I don’t care to watch a 1-seed in a game they’re not playing very well. There are other things, conversely, I can do instead of watching if the outcome is a blowout as expected. Neither of these outcomes excite me.
There is one part of the tournament, however, I do find much more interesting than the games.
Ladies and gentlemen, my greatest spectating pleasure among all the tournament action is not on the court. It’s the office pool, more specifically its participants!
These small-time bettors collectively make the championship run-launching Thursday afternoon the least productive office workday in the United States each year.
Pool participant Levels 1 and 2, explained here shortly, are the most fun to watch when their brackets implode!
More schadenfreude, readers! While Cinderella gives me agita (look it up kids!) about upcoming TV ratings, she steals my heart when she contaminates the brackets of Levels 1 and 2.
Level 1 – the Jay Bilas (ESPN analyst and host) wanna-be. This savvy fan followed teams throughout the season, catching many of the tournament’s participants’ games throughout the winter. These guys and gals used RPI rankings, evaluated performance on neutral courts, reviewed key player matchups. Their thorough approach gives them hope for a perfect bracket, but they expect a single-digit number of losses, and the spoils of the pool prize in turn.
Level 2 - the mathematician. This individual looks at the frequency of, for example, 12-seed wins over 5-seeds, the winning percentage an 8-seed has against the 9-seed, the success rate of Eastern teams playing in the West, or in high altitudes like Denver, Salt Lake and Albuquerque. Their pool-clinching prognostication is the prediction of the score in the finals game. This person will tell you, “I already knew that” when you mention something you learned from a Freakonomics podcast.
Level 3 – rock, chalk, (they’ll pick the) Jayhawks – evokes mixed emotions within me. This pool player is one who “goes chalk”, the term used for predicting wins based on seeding numbers. This person has each 1-seed in the final four. Sure, they know they might lose some games along the way, but there is very little chance the 1-seeds will be toppled these days with a smaller group of dominant programs.
I’m enamored with their chill approach to putting a bracket together, saying to Levels 1 and 2, “The time you spent is high effort-low reward.” If this approach yields pool-leading fruit, though, I curse their slipshod selections. Worse yet, they won’t admit dumb luck put them in the office pool driver’s seat. Instead, they’ll start to behave as if this is the year the selection committee finally got it completely right, and they were knowledgeable enough to agree with each seeding, and wager accordingly.
My favorite, Level 4, is the group who can’t be named because of the variety of ways these people abandon all college basketball knowledge they have, or worse yet lack any college basketball knowledge. They use innumerable non-basketball, non-mathematic methodologies to fill their brackets. Such scope and approach include whose mascot would win in battle (would a Blue Devil beat a Red Raider?), whose mascot is cuter (Terrapins are turtles, right? They’re so cute!), whose mascots are inanimate vs. living (like Western Kentucky’s red… round… something!). My editor, a proud WKU?alumnus, might exile me on that Western Kentucky mascot description if the Hoosier state doesn’t exile me first for my lack of interest in the tournament action.
Thank Heaven the Big Dance is back, and while Clark Kellogg and Charles Barkley break down the action on TNT throughout each tournament weekend, I’ll be breaking down the office bracketologists among Levels 1 through 4.
Something was different Thursday afternoon. My workday was full, so the obvious difference didn’t occur to me until I finished a project in between some afternoon meetings. The NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, the Round of 64, wasn’t taking place Thursday afternoon.
The Round of 64 phase of the tournament tends to start the third Thursday of March each year following a play-in tournament of four teams usually vying for 12th and 16th seeds on Tuesday and Wednesday.
College basketball, like many other sports over the last twelve months, has experienced post-season modifications. Even the IHSAA boys’ basketball finals dates were moved due to the availability of Indianapolis basketball venues already committed to the tournament.
The Round of 64 begins Friday afternoon, instead. Thus, ends a decades-long string of NCAA tournament opening round Thursdays, the launch of March Madness!
The NCAA tournament does nothing… well… almost nothing for me anymore!
If a Cinderella team makes the Elite Eight or the Final Four, all I think about is the television ratings decline the upstart program is going to cause because of a major power with assured big television ratings like Kansas or Gonzaga, for example, has been eliminated before Sweet 16 weekend.
What about the opening round, you ask? The excitement of a 16-seed giving a 1-seed fits?
If such is the case, I don’t care to watch a 1-seed in a game they’re not playing very well. There are other things, conversely, I can do instead of watching if the outcome is a blowout as expected. Neither of these outcomes excite me.
There is one part of the tournament, however, I do find much more interesting than the games.
Ladies and gentlemen, my greatest spectating pleasure among all the tournament action is not on the court. It’s the office pool, more specifically its participants!
These small-time bettors collectively make the championship run-launching Thursday afternoon the least productive office workday in the United States each year.
Pool participant Levels 1 and 2, explained here shortly, are the most fun to watch when their brackets implode!
More schadenfreude, readers! While Cinderella gives me agita (look it up kids!) about upcoming TV ratings, she steals my heart when she contaminates the brackets of Levels 1 and 2.
Level 1 – the Jay Bilas (ESPN analyst and host) wanna-be. This savvy fan followed teams throughout the season, catching many of the tournament’s participants’ games throughout the winter. These guys and gals used RPI rankings, evaluated performance on neutral courts, reviewed key player matchups. Their thorough approach gives them hope for a perfect bracket, but they expect a single-digit number of losses, and the spoils of the pool prize in turn.
Level 2 - the mathematician. This individual looks at the frequency of, for example, 12-seed wins over 5-seeds, the winning percentage an 8-seed has against the 9-seed, the success rate of Eastern teams playing in the West, or in high altitudes like Denver, Salt Lake and Albuquerque. Their pool-clinching prognostication is the prediction of the score in the finals game. This person will tell you, “I already knew that” when you mention something you learned from a Freakonomics podcast.
Level 3 – rock, chalk, (they’ll pick the) Jayhawks – evokes mixed emotions within me. This pool player is one who “goes chalk”, the term used for predicting wins based on seeding numbers. This person has each 1-seed in the final four. Sure, they know they might lose some games along the way, but there is very little chance the 1-seeds will be toppled these days with a smaller group of dominant programs.
I’m enamored with their chill approach to putting a bracket together, saying to Levels 1 and 2, “The time you spent is high effort-low reward.” If this approach yields pool-leading fruit, though, I curse their slipshod selections. Worse yet, they won’t admit dumb luck put them in the office pool driver’s seat. Instead, they’ll start to behave as if this is the year the selection committee finally got it completely right, and they were knowledgeable enough to agree with each seeding, and wager accordingly.
My favorite, Level 4, is the group who can’t be named because of the variety of ways these people abandon all college basketball knowledge they have, or worse yet lack any college basketball knowledge. They use innumerable non-basketball, non-mathematic methodologies to fill their brackets. Such scope and approach include whose mascot would win in battle (would a Blue Devil beat a Red Raider?), whose mascot is cuter (Terrapins are turtles, right? They’re so cute!), whose mascots are inanimate vs. living (like Western Kentucky’s red… round… something!). My editor, a proud WKU?alumnus, might exile me on that Western Kentucky mascot description if the Hoosier state doesn’t exile me first for my lack of interest in the tournament action.
Thank Heaven the Big Dance is back, and while Clark Kellogg and Charles Barkley break down the action on TNT throughout each tournament weekend, I’ll be breaking down the office bracketologists among Levels 1 through 4.
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