State Your Case – What is the Best Tournament in Sports?
What is the best tournament in sports?
Jason Walker – @thejwalk67
Even with the World Cup upon us, I have to go with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Words cannot describe the completely unique atmosphere that March Madness brings every year.
Sure, the NFL, NBA or the World Cup will provide better quality of play (which makes them very enjoyable to watch) but they lack the consistent and ever-present drama that the NCAA Tournament never fails to provide.
No other tournament has the same reputation for upset bids and Cinderella stories. Just think about Loyola-Chicago from this year’s tournament. A team nobody had ever heard of, upended not only four teams with superior seeds, but also the entire sports world in the space of a few days.
Compare that to other tournaments. The NBA has had only one good NBA finals since 2013 and has featured the same player for eight straight seasons (and the same two teams for the last four). Since the 2000-01 NFL season, just four quarterbacks have represented the AFC in the Super Bowl (Tom Brady earning seven appearances by himself. And the 20 World Cup titles are spread out among eight European or South American teams.
Along with being the only tournament to essentially embody a whole month of the year, the NCAA Tournament has also given birth to one of the most prolific and weird traditions in sports history: bracket challenges. In no other sport do millions of fans try and predict every game result for a tournament. Even people who haven’t watched a second of college basketball can be found trying to guess who will win it all.
There are plenty of excellent tournaments to be enjoyed in the sports world but there are easily none better than the yearly gathering of 68 teams vying to cut down the nets in March.
Matt Harris – matthewrh1214@gmail.com
Jason makes a hard case to argue.
It’s true that no tournament can get more unpredictable than the NCAA Tournament. At best, the team who can most be considered a “dynasty” in college basketball would be Duke, and even then, they have a very loose grip.
This, however, is about the BEST postseason, not the craziest, and as predictable as it’s been in the last several years, there’s no bigger postseason than the Big Game itself: the Super Bowl.
Firstly, compared to other professional sports in the country, NFL football is the one organization that doesn’t have set in place a drawn-out, sleep-inducing “best-of-?” structure in their playoff. This monster is nothing more than a money-grabbing goliath that keeps the top teams safer from elimination. As a wildcard team in the NFL playoffs, you don’t need 16-28 games to prove yourself. Just beat the teams you need to beat, and you win.
Coming back to the Puppy Bowl Postgame Show (Google it.), people across the country might make a quick bracket that they don’t really care about for the NCAA tournament, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to watch any games. When that first Sunday of February hits, all who call themselves American will devote their weekend to party planning, buying a new TV, picking a team to support, and spending 4 hours watching a game that gets closer every to becoming its own national holiday.
The Super Bowl has become an excuse for families to get together, for people who’ve never cared about football to cheer for every first down. The Super Bowl is an American tradition, and it doesn’t get better than that.