The popularity of the NCAA tournament, is due in no small part to the fact that Americans love to bet on an outcome.
In the middle of my explanation, I realized I didn’t know the answer. Not the way I thought I did, anyway. It’s funny when that happens, isn’t it? When someone else’s fresh eyes make you reevaluate what you’ve assumed for decades? When uttering a basic truth out loud makes you wonder, for perhaps the first time ever, if it’s still true at all? Or if it ever was? Maybe I was the wrong guy to ask.
But when a French reporter, wanting his readers to understand an unfamiliar phenomenon, asked me this week why Americans love the event known as March Madness, I figured it would be easy to help him out. After all, I’ve watched the NCAA basketball tournament for practically my whole life. As a kid on Selection Sunday I’d draw my own brackets in a spiral notebook and scribble in the names of the teams as they were announced on TV. As a sports writer I’ve covered no fewer than 100 tournament games over a quarter-century, including eight Final Fours and counting. This should be considered an area of expertise, shouldn’t it? My friend and colleague Maxime Aubin, a French reporter who’s lived in San Antonio the last couple of years covering Victor Wembanyama for L’Equipe, thought I’d be a decent guy to ask about this stuff. But as I tried to break it all down for him, I noticed my story kept changing the longer I spoke. “So it’s about gambling?” Aubin asked. “Yes,” I said, upon a couple of seconds of contemplation. “But not really gambling.” Of course his presumption was correct, in many ways. Of course the popularity of the NCAA tournament, like that of so many other major sporting events these days, is due in no small part to the fact that Americans love to bet on the outcome. And of course the TV ratings on CBS, TNT, TBS and TruTV likely would crater if no one in the viewing audience had a financial stake, however trivial, in who wins and loses. According to the American Gaming Association, people in this country will bet more than $3.1 billion legally in this year’s men’s and women’s tournaments. That covers more than 120 games combined, but it’s more than is bet on the Super Bowl. It’s an astronomical number, and it makes my protestations to Aubin seem more than a bit naïve. But my point, perhaps a bit romanticized, was that most people who “bet” on March Madness aren’t doing so in the traditional sense, one game at a time, through a certified sports book or a neighborhood oddsmaker. I tried to explain that two or three decades ago, the appeal lay in more innocent “illicit” activities. Office pools technically were illegal, but everyone could print out a bracket, everyone could fill them in, and you didn’t have to know much about college basketball to have a chance to beat the guy who’d been watching ACC and Big West games on cable every night since November. Throwing $10 or $20 into the pool was just for fun, and mostly harmless. And anyone could get lucky. “Because there are lots of upsets, right?” Aubin asked. “Exactly,” I said, and this is where I really started to believe I was onto something. In American pro sports, I told Aubin, there really aren’t any little guys. Historically, the Los Angeles Lakers are much more successful than the Charlotte Hornets, but they both pay their players millions, and nobody is shocked when the Hornets win. In college football, there are shocking results every now and then, but the small programs don’t have a realistic chance to compete against the sheer talent and size of the powerhouses. In college basketball, the underdogs can find themselves on equal footing every now and then. In a way, I told Aubin, it’s our version of promotion and relegation in European soccer, which gives the humble, seemingly overmatched underdogs a chance to take down the heavyweights. For a few minutes, I was proud of this comparison. Then I started to think about the past decade or so, where every change in college sports has been about consolidating power, and made it increasingly likely that the little guys will get squeezed out. Do we really like the underdogs in America? Or do we just claim to? By the time I finished talking to Aubin, I wasn’t sure anymore. Across the ocean, there apparently are readers in France wondering why we care about March Madness. I’m now curious to find out if they understand it any more than we do.
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