March Madness Meta

March Madness is, as Marx or Hemingway might write, an opium of the people. Something to distract from the sea of manipulative corporate control in which we find ourselves immersed. March Madness is one of a handful of iconic American sporting events that function as a kind of scuba gear whose foul air somehow generates the hallucination of clean breathing.

March Madness has grown over decades into one of the major gambling foci of the American sports year. And while gambling, as Hemingway added, was "an opium of the people if there ever was one," gambling is only tangentially related to today's entry.

The elements and foibles that have led March Madness to its prominent spot on the American stage are worth mentioning. My observations are banal and obvious, but that doesn't render them untrue. The culture of March Madness can, from an Orwellian perspective, be quite unsettling.

What is March Madness About?

Well, first of all, months and months of the college basketball regular season feature continual speculation regarding where teams should be placed, if at all, in the post-season tournament, and who should be ranked where based on what. It's all very erudite in an intense obsessive kind of way, but the only reason such speculation exists is because the 350 teams reside in compartmentalized leagues with very little interaction between the disparate conferences. All of the pseudo-academic debate takes place in a context that assumes teams with designated 5-Star athletes are better than teams with designated 3-Star athletes. Other assumptions include the idea that teams paying their coaches more are intrinsically better than teams paying their coaches less, that teams playing in buildings that seat more people are superior to teams playing in buildings with fewer seats, and that teams on television regularly are better than teams that are not.

These are fascinating assumptions, fascinating in the sense that there is no reason for any of them to necessarily be very true. And if they are a bit true, the confidence and degree to which they are true may be wildly exaggerated. 

Basketball teams, as I and the movie Hoosiers argue ad nauseum, are organisms. They are not collections of individuals, 5-Star or otherwise. If we are at the point where the smallest team in Division 1 knocks off a one seed, and where alleged blue blood collections of 5-Stars in Kentucky, Kansas, and Duke are routinely shown an early exit despite all the advantages of their seeds, then what is the point of presumptive seeds at all other than to protect television ratings and to promote players/coaches/teams who have been promoted in the past?

All of these assumptions, presumptions, and overt legacy-team rigging contribute to the opposite of what sport is supposed to be. It's something akin to Soviet skater-judging in events held in the Soviet Union. If you stay upright, legacy carries you a long way.

The Meta(s) of March

Does any of this ring a bell?

People compartmentalized into disparate populations based on income of parents, the size of the home in which one lives, the notoriety and accomplishments of immediate relatives. Also, compartmentalized possibilities for income based on social exposure, being ranked by others, and evaluating people as individuals while ignoring how they have functioned and accomplished with unrelated others. 

It's obvious meta with the culture at large, of course, this March Madness stuff. Personally, I think it's got quite the resonance.

Another lesson to be learned from March Madness is the old theme of acquiescence to designated authority. Talking heads on every network "debate" the quality of teams without debating the quality of the debate process. Then everyone bows their heads, shuts their eyes and minds, and obsequiously waits for the white smoke from the Committee Conclave. A bunch of guys, mostly white, deciding that Purdue (with the team speed of a glacier) should be a one seed, Memphis (who damn near beat one seed Houston two out of three) is an eight, and Florida Atlantic (with 30 wins) is a nine. And those two 28+-win squads from FAU's league -- well, we've run out of white smoke.

Acquiescence to white guy conclaves. Capitalistic self interest (FAU didn't NOT accept a spot because their brethren got shafted). More capitalistic self interest (Memphis and FAU, playing each other after getting hosed, could have refused to play each other). Bow to the conclave. Cash your checks gladly. March Madness has considerable resonance with a corporate, authoritarian real world with more pseudo-expertise than actual.

Opportunity Versus Probability

If I had to choose the worst cultural Meta of March Madness, I think it might be the presentation of "an opportunity" as the equivalent of "a fair and equal opportunity." 

The NCAA Tournament Committee has been running simulations with various seeding scenarios forever. For years, they've been able to tell which slottings have what effects on teams' chances of advancing or winning. It's a kind of backwards engineering. Design the experiment to get the results needed. Sort of like student loans being approved based on zip codes, if I may stretch the resonance a bit.

There is an enormous sleight of mind being fed to American sports fans when simple inclusion in the tournament implies that a team has gotten fair and equitable treatment, and that inclusion in the tournament means that the overseers can now wash their hands since anyone in the tournament "has a chance." Like Jim Carrey's Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber being thrilled since there is "a chance."

This selling of "an opportunity" as "a fair opportunity" is the raison d'etre of American sports in general. The poor have a chance to become rich. What more could they ask? It's such an innumerate argument, waving empty canteens at a cultural desert full of people with the promise that one in a thousand canteens contains actual water. It's The Hunger Games in a TV-friendly format.

Conclusion

One of the great lines of March Madness television is the one about "They pass the eye test." As if everyone has the same set of eyes. More ominous is the implication that, regardless of our eye differences, we should all be seeing the same things anyway. 

When the essence of sport, the ritual of a level-playing-field competition, is co-opted and manipulated by conclaves with all of the power, it's time to recognize how corrupt and anti-sport the process has become. March Madness, unfortunately, has evolved into a homunculus of all the worst aspects of American culture as a whole. 

Bob Dietz

March 31, 2023

Smoking the Seeds: 2023

I've spent years debunking the Rube Goldberg machinations of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. Season after season, the members of said committee have been screwing non-brand-name teams by imposing bad seedings and manipulating bracket design in service of writing checks to the major conferences. Teams' Q-Ratings and potential overall television ratings seem to have been the committee's guiding lights.

Once upon a time, back in the era when RPI was the committee's dominant tool (and Missouri State, with a low-30's RPI, got royally hosed), the committee at least tried to be semi-subtle about it. As the years have passed, however, the committee has become about as subtle as a Trump rally -- white, loud, and indifferent to history or reason. They've massaged every major conference wannabe winner into the tournament while designing gauntlets to squeeze the pesky low-Q teams out ASAP.

The Toughest Region

As most seasons unfold, I usually invest between 4K and 5K on assorted long shots, half of which are generally of the non-brand-name variety. This year I invested just dinner money on a couple of teams. When I saw the East bracket, I was glad I had just dinner money on the line. Literally half the teams I considered were in the East region. My initial reaction to the East was that it was arguably the toughest region of all time. 

The East had two hugely underrated sleepers in Florida Atlantic and Oral Roberts. I thought there were three or four teams in the East better than Purdue. Charles Barkley predicted that Memphis would handle Purdue in the second round. So did I. The problem was Memphis first had to face the nine-seeded, 30-win FAU Owls, whose three losses had all been on the road. Why FAU was a nine, I couldn't tell you. Why Memphis was an eight, I couldn't tell you, either. Memphis had hammered Houston in the AAC final and had almost beaten them a second time. Houston was a one seed; why was Memphis given no respect?

The East also had Kentucky, Tennessee, and Duke, all potential Final Four teams. Plus a tourney-scary Michigan State. And I'm not even mentioning the one through three seeds (Purdue, Marquette, and Kansas State). 

What sins did these teams commit to all be jammed into this bracket from hell?

Shoehorns and Exclusions

The usual collection of Big 10 teams was shoehorned into the tournament. Teams that were frozen out included Liberty, a couple of AAC squads in Tulane and Cincinnati, and two teams from Conference USA, North Texas and UAB. 

My arguments for these teams go something like this:  Kennesaw State had three-seed Xavier on the ropes in their tournament game until a late no-call turned the tide. Liberty was comparable to Kennesaw. If Houston was all that, then the AAC should have been assigned more teams. Tulane and Cincinnati had similar records to those shoehorned Big 10 squads. Given the Big 10's questionable showing in the tournament, it's not a reach to suggest that Tulane and Cincinnati deserved serious consideration. And finally, given FAU's run, it's also not a stretch to conclude that 29-7 North Texas and 28-9 UAB should have been invited. 

The shoehorning of Big 10 teams is, as I said, an annual abuse.

Clearing the Smoke

The conference tournaments prove nothing and extend an already too-lengthy college season. Key injuries occurred in a handful of conference tournaments; Kentucky, UCLA, and Houston were all the worse for it. Players either aggravated existing injuries by trying to play or suffered injuries during the conference tournaments themselves. These conference tourneys cost the blue bloods this year. 

The tourneys exist primarily to pad brand-name conference coffers, so it's fitting that blue blood greed led, in the long haul, to fewer NCAA tourney checks for those blue bloods.

Basketball teams are organisms, not collections of individuals. The brand names suffered mightily as injuries mounted and fragile chemistries affected by those injuries melted down in the cauldron of one-and-done. What surprised me most was that some experienced off brand teams that figured to be good but not overwhelming, such as Creighton and San Diego State, handled squads with more firepower. 

Conclusion 

Going forward, all we can hope is that the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee will make note of their errors, admit their malfeasance, and swear off their unfair seedings. Yes, perhaps the next time three Conference USA teams win 28 games or more, the committee will consider taking more than one of them. And maybe consider giving one of them a seed higher than nine.

But -- LOL -- let's not hold our breath waiting.

Bob Dietz

March 28, 2023