NCAA brackets should be fun, even with billions as stake

According to a March 18 news release by the American Gaming Association (AGA), about 47 million American adults will wager $8.5 billion on this year’s NCAA mens basketball tournament.

Other findings in a survey conducted by the AGA indicate $4.6 billion will be wagered on a collective 149 million brackets by more than 400 million people. Nearly 18 million people will wager $3.9 billion at a sportsbook establishment (4.1 million people), online (5.2 million, likely at illegal offshore sites) or with a bookie (2.4 million) or friend.

“During this year’s tournament, sports fans are expected to bet 40 percent more than they did on this year’s Super Bowl,” said Bill Miller, AGA’s president and chief executive officer, said in the release. “Unlike any other sporting event in the country, March Madness attracts millions who fill out brackets, make casual bets with friends or wager at a legal sportsbook, which Americans can now do more than ever before.”

That’s some scratch man. And, you can count my $20 in that $4.6 billion bracket amount.

I do it every year, as do many others. In fact, some people are in several different brackets while some may have more than one bracket entry in a pool and others have multiple brackets in multiple pools.

Most of this is simple fun, such as office pools and pools among friends. The pool I’m currently in I joined almost 10 years ago after being invited by a friend to participate.

Running up to the first games, mine and likely many other bracketeers’ email boxes were filled with tons of messages — many from ESPN and CBS Sports — detailing how human experts and computers have spent an exorbitant amount of time analyzing the match ups and predicting winners, all to help the rest of us make intelligent decisions with our brackets.

I’ve used these folks before and found sometimes they’re pretty good, other times they frankly suck. I have just as much luck making my own decisions based on my research as they do. In fact, I could put the team names on a board and throw darts to select winners and probably do OK.

This year, I entered two brackets in the pool, one for me and one for my wife. Sheila knows a fair amount about basketball, but decided she was going to employ her own system to select teams — a system that put a new meaning to the phrase “color commentary.”

Sheila based her decisions on the teams’ uniforms, using their mascots as a tiebreaker just in case two teams going up against each other had cool uniforms. She poured over team websites, scanning and comparing photos. I think she did more work than I did.

She took into account school colors and such aspects of design as the type of fonts, how those fonts were use and their sizes, accents around letters and numbers as well as accents and style components on shorts and jerseys. Creativity, boldness of design, all that went into her consideration.

As might be expected, this led to some unusual selections, really chancy picks, such as Gardner-Webb over Virginia — which didn’t happen. It also created some dilemmas, such as the possibility of Kentucky (her favorite uniformed team) and North Carolina (her second favorite) squaring off in the Midwest regional finals. If both teams were on opposite sides of the bracket, that would have been her championship game.

As it was, the final four teams that had the best uniforms/or decided by mascot, are Kentucky, Louisville, Texas Tech and Kansas State — with only Kentucky and Texas Tech still in the running. I’m sure others who used more traditional bracket selection methods are in the same boat, with one or two final four teams left.

I mean, who would have thought last year that No. 1-seeded Virginia would be the first such seeded team to lose to a No. 16 selection? That busted many brackets.

As it is, Sheila did fairly well through the opening round, but faded in the field of 32. As for me, the same, but while I still have an intact Final Four — of which Gonzaga is not a member — and Elite Eight, I’m in the middle of the pack.

No matter, it’s for fun, or at least it should be. So Wednesday night, my wife and I will be like many others, and re-pick teams in the Sweet 16.

The payoff? While it won’t be millions, let’s just say we’re both looking forward to a trip west on U.S. Highway 2 to Billy Burgers.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].