Human sports fans beat robots during March Madness
Despite what you may hear about me, I like sports. But then, I enjoy watching sports the same way I might enjoy a pet dog – I’d like to look at it, but I wouldn’t want to dissect it. Since I’m not really thinking about what I’m seeing when I watch a game, I’ve got a kind of sports amnesia. I could watch a basketball game today and by tomorrow I wouldn’t be able to tell you the final score, the names of the players, the names of the teams or who won. I would probably be able to tell you if somebody was seriously injured, started a fistfight or hit a spectator in the head with a ball.
Over the course of the academic year, the sports fans in my office may have labeled me as an “unpatriotic communist” for some innocent, factual observations about how boring baseball is. I tried to defend myself with logic, which turned out to be a mistake.
So several weeks ago, I thought I’d help ease some of the tension by entering the office March Madness pool. When I told our sports editor I wanted to fill out a bracket, he laughed out loud. To his credit, he agreed to let me play.
You’d think a little actual knowledge of March Madness would rub off on a newsman like me due to the media’s laser-like focus on the tournament every year. But all I knew was that something named Butler had won recently – a lot of people were excited about that when it happened – and some parts of a bracket had names like the Sweet 16 and the Fantastic Four. The basketball fans in the office, however, knew a frightening number of facts about the NCAA. I’d overhear facts like, “A school with 15 letters in its name has never beat a school with 13,” and, “It’s been 300 years since a religious school has burned another team’s player for suspected witchcraft.”
Like any good college student, I decided to cover up my ignorance with technology. I Googled “March Madness bracket generator” and found pickmybracket.com. The site – created by students of a school owned by a certain Utah-based church – automatically fills out a bracket based on statistics, school attributes and some kind of computer magic. The site asked me to pick a stat I’d like to emphasize, so I picked assists because I’ve always been taught that sharing is good. Then it asked me to pick a random factor to emphasize, so I picked SAT scores because I’m an idiot. The site then spit out a bracket with Harvard as the champion. Even I knew that was wrong. I tried again, emphasizing coed hotness, and got a bracket with Indiana on top. That sounded great because I’d seen a poster for a movie about basketball in Indiana. And if basketball can make a whole state proud of being “Hoosiers,” which sounds more like an insult than a mascot, then Indiana basketball must be good.
A few days into the tournament, acquaintances started tweeting about how the first round shredded their brackets. Those poor souls should have trusted technology like I did, I thought. Then I had our sports editor show me how my bracket was doing, with the aid of highlighters. He marked my good picks in yellow and my bad picks in pink. I was pleased with how yellow my bracket looked, until he explained how my bad picks filter down the bracket. He marked all the games I’d lost in advance in pink. It wasn’t pretty, unless you like pink.
Then my wife had a baby, and the closest I got to basketball for a couple of weeks was throwing soggy diapers into the trash. March Madness caught my attention again on Monday, when the basketball fans in the office turned on the TV. I was shocked to learn that Indiana wasn’t even in the game. It shouldn’t have been a shock, considering that Indiana lost to Syracuse in the Sweet 16 – but remember the sports amnesia I mentioned in the first paragraph? I don’t.
So technology has failed me yet again. I only had two teams in the Great Eight and none in the Fantastic Four, which is not stellar, but better than some of the sports staff did. I did better than two of the six of them, to be specific, with 490 of 1920 points. I don’t think 25 percent is a passing grade in any class. At least I have time to improve my study skills before finals.
– Steve Kent is editor in chief of The Utah Statesman and not actually a communist. When he’s not busy with school, he plays for the Narwhals, the second most-hated rec hockey team in Logan. Send comments, questions and insults to steve.kent@aggiemail.usu.edu or on Twitter: @StevenDKent