Mad World

It’s NCAA tournament time. Or March Madness as it’s called. I think that name came from the seemingly unpredictable nature of men’s college basketball during the month. It might just as easily have come from the feeling we get when we discover that those tournament brackets that we filled out oh-so-carefully have become worthless.

I don’t follow college basketball as much as I used to. I can probably name more players in the Big Ten from the 1993-94 season than the 2013-14 season. I still pay attention every March though, and after Selection Sunday I still fill out a bracket, just like every other person with even a passing interest in sports.

And inevitably, usually by the following Friday, when the tournament is actually half over, my bracket is a mishmash of circles and lines—mostly lines—indicating which of my choices won and which lost. Then I beat myself up for not having foreseen that number thirteen seed upsetting the four seed. “It’s so obvious! How could I have missed it?” Psychological researchers have a term for this: Hindsight bias. We know all the answers after the fact!

That’s so annoying.

Maybe the only thing more annoying is seeing the brackets chosen by “experts” in college basketball. The “experts” inevitably choose mostly number one seeds to make it to the Final Four. Gee whiz, picking the best teams to win really takes a lot of expertise. Never mind that in the long history of the tournament all four number one seeds have made the Final Four only once. Experts continue to have foresight ignorance (I just coined that term) and pick the favorites to win. Is it bad that I gain a fairly large amount of joy from seeing experts look foolish?

The big story this year though is about the $1 billion challenge that some company is offering. If you correctly choose the winner of the 63 tournament games (after the play-in games) you’ll win $1 billion. Don’t go buying yourself a new house yet though. The chances of a choosing a perfect bracket are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1. That’s 9.2 quintillion. To one.

Let’s think of that another way. Every single person on the planet would have to complete 1.3 billion brackets each to ensure that someone would complete a perfect bracket. I’ve only done one bracket so far, so I guess it’s probably not going to happen.

I saw a story earlier today where some outplacement firm (what the heck is an outplacement firm?) estimated that March Madness costs the U.S. economy $1.2 billion in lost productivity. That sounds like one of the 64% of statistics that are made up on the spot! No doubt this is the work of some manager who can’t stand to see his employees having a little fun.

Maybe we’ll see those two stories come together. If someone chooses a perfect bracket maybe they can donate their $1 billion to the U.S. economy, so it only loses $200 million. Then, when you throw in the $1 bracket pools that take place in offices across the country, there’s probably no loss at all!

It’s no small coincidence that the NCAA Tournament championship game takes place in April. Most of the madness occurs in the early rounds in March. Unless there’s some underdog team playing, many people have lost interest by the time the championship game is on. All of our brackets are in the recycling bin by then, and when a team cuts down the nets we try to think back to three weeks earlier and figure out how we couldn’t have seen it coming.

Two weeks later no one even remembers who played in the championship game.

So I’ll monitor scores over the next few days and hope that my bracket doesn’t end up in the garbage before the work week is over. I know how it’ll turn out though. It’ll turn out the same way it always turns out: I’ll yell a few choice words about the bracket itself and become consumed with an irrational hatred for some small school that didn’t beat the powerhouse school like I predicted. Only this year I’ll have the added disappointment of not winning the billion dollars!

Madness indeed.