March is the time of year when the nation's elite college basketball teams battle one another to be the best, yet players are not the only ones getting in on the action.
Fans of the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Florida Gators, as well as others, are paying close attention to their brackets this week, hoping they have made the right decisions while waiting to see which teams make it to the Elite 8.
March Madness is everywhere, and viewers can choose to take part in the NCAA Tournament in a variety of ways, ranging from simply catching a few games to watching all the games and related coverage.
Die-hard basketball fans are watching the games on CBS, tuning in to "bracketology" programs, recaps of the games and unlimited expert analysis on channels such as ESPN. Fans can even find free on-demand coverage of the games on their computers through CBS Sportsline.com.
The NCAA tournament creates the option for fans to participate and experiment with the art of creating their own brackets. Fans ranging from children to adults can create brackets and monitor them on Web sites such as www.yahoo.com and ESPN.com. Even the Web site www.facebook.com offers an option this year for its users to create pools and compete with one another to see who can best forecast the tournament's results.
At this point of putting together brackets, I think it is up to the individual to determine how much is too much. There is no way to determine the amount of time the average person spent on his or her bracket this year, but many do not take this task lightly. For instance, my boyfriend probably spent about seven or eight hours constructing his bracket. I, on the other hand, spent about 30 minutes. I'll give readers one guess as to who is ahead at this point - me.
Many people, myself included, see the practice of intense team analysis and "bracketology" to be a waste of time. This is where my argument comes in: Most teams in the tournament can play well or poorly on any given day.
Some teams are better than others and were seeded high enough for an easy win at the beginning of the tournament, but consider the Texas Longhorns. Those who spent hours attempting to create the "perfect" bracket probably chose the dependable Texas team and its best player, Kevin Durant, to make it to at least the Sweet 16. Well, it didn't. This example defends my theory that spending an insane amount of time trying to pick winners doesn't always produce results.
The fact my bracket looks better than my boyfriend's right now is basically luck. I had no strategy when putting together my bracket, except for sticking with the No. 1 seeds and picking some higher seeds because I always feel sorry for the "underdogs." When USC and North Carolina come together and play in hopes of making it to the Elite 8, no one truly can predict who will win. People can study statistics, read a variety of articles and watch as many sports programs as they want, but no one can guess the outcome. So, why the waste of time even trying to predict the winning team?
The point of this column, if not clear, is many people spend a large portion of the month trying to pick the winning teams and watching teams to whom they have no connection. I guess this is my point of contention. It is unclear to me people's motivations for doing this and spending so much time when they could be doing something more constructive such as visiting with family, building relationships with friends and so on.
I am amazed at how we have gone from supporting our home teams to feeling we have to follow all 65 teams to the very end.
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