The first round of the NCAA tournament is the most exciting event in sports
I generally try to be rational and level-headed when I react to sports — my Steph Curry tweets excepting — but at the risk of sounding extremely reactionary, I’m just going to say it: the first round of the NCAA tournament are the two most exciting days of the sports year.
Okay, maybe that isn’t that dramatic of a statement. I bet a lot of you even nodded as you read that sentence. But think about that claim. The first two days of the tournament include a number of significant mismatches — more than half of this year’s first round games were decided by double-digits and seven of them were decided by 20 points or more — and the games are sometimes horribly ugly (a moment of silence for anyone that watched the Wisconsin-Pittsburgh game on Friday).
What I’m claiming is that the first round of this amateur, turnover-laden, blowout-filled tournament is more exciting than the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the World Series, college football bowl season, the UEFA Champions League, the Olympics or the World Cup (which had more than a billion people watch the final in 2014).
The NCAA tournament loses some of its excitement as it progresses, whereas events like the World Cup, the Champions League or the Olympics gain excitement the longer they go. And the quality of the product in the NBA Finals is lightyears beyond what the tournament provides. Taken as a whole, many of those other sporting events are better spectacles.
But the first two days of March Madness are absolute magic and nothing else can top it.
No other sporting event on the planet can compete with the sheer number of games — 32 of them in a roughly 24-hour period and as many as four of them on at once for the majority of each day. It’s very rare that all of the games on at any given time are duds, so as long as you can find TruTV, you’re virtually guaranteed to find at least one exciting game on.
People of all ages love the tournament, but it’s especially attractive to the Millennial generation: constant channel-flipping, nonstop-action and a maelstrom of social media use, which creates the feeling of community and togetherness that researchers say our generation craves.
The advent of bracket pools has only added to the enjoyment of the tournament, especially the first round. It creates a rooting interest where none existed before and provides immediate bragging rights for anyone that gets lucky and picks a couple of the first-round upsets (don’t pretend like you knew Michigan State was going to lose to the Blue Raiders).
The true beauty of the first round, however, are those upsets. I know they’re coming every year, yet I still lose my mind every time a double-digit seed advances to the next round. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for the underdog victories (Middle Tennessee State!!!!) and I get so emotionally invested in these schools I don’t have any rational reason to root for. I was as elated with Arkansas Little-Rock’s double-overtime win as any Trojan fan and as crushed with Florida Gulf Coast’s defeat as any resident of Dunk City.
But there’s always another team to win my heart (did I mention Middle Tennessee?) and that’s why the tournament is so exciting.
Now that the tournament has progressed to the Sweet Sixteen, most of those double-digit seeds have been knocked out, there are fewer games and the action is less-constant.
I’m already counting down the days to the first round of the tournament next year.
—Thomas Sorenson is a junior majoring in journalism and only skipped a couple of classes on Thursday and Friday to watch the first round. He maintains that the NBA is vastly superior to college basketball, but respects the right of everyone who thinks college basketball is better to be wrong. Still, he loves the spectacle of the tournament and will forever cheer for Dunk City.
thomas.sorenson@aggiemail.usu.edu
Twitter: @tomcat340