The NCAA Basketball Tournament

A Modest Propoal:

A Cure for the March Madness

March Madness! Indeed it is. Look at it this way.

After a certain recent round of March madness, everyone in College Park, Maryland, was euphoric. Typically such joy is expressed by burning other people’s property (oddly enough, it is also a feature of the fans of the losing teams). It is delightful to identify and exuberate with a team that wins a national championship. But there was no joy in Bloomington, Indiana, nor, for that matter, in the sixty-two other cities and towns hoping to applaud the victors as their teams entered the NCAA tournament.

For it is a fact of this process that every team but one ends the season on a loss and returns home crestfallen. March Doldrums might be a better name. The end result of the annual NCAA whirlwind is to make almost everybody a loser. You take sixty-four of the best teams in the nation and humiliate all but one by making them lose the last game of the year. It’s a March massacre. What a bummer.

What nut could have invented such a scheme, in a nation so dedicated to the proposition that everyone should be a winner. Surely no patriot: the net effect is to weaken the national fiber, and morale. It all adds up to a massive jolt to the aggregate self-esteem that is the very soul of the Great US of A.

In the pros, losing at the end doesn’t matter quite as much. Their fans are less locally concentrated, and the guys still get their big money. But in college the poor blokes toil for the pure glory of it, and then the final buzzer takes it all away.

There is a better way. It would not be hard to put an end to this annual, massive March cascade into purgatory. All it takes is a fresh perspective on tournaments.

Supposing, quite simply, that instead of sending the winner of each game on to the next round, it was the loser who advanced and the winner who must drop out. What a difference that would make! No one goes home a loser: you have to win the right to go home. You cut down the nets as soon as you can manage to win, and go back to a victory celebration with your fans.

The bottom line, the big gain, would provide a great nationwide boost to morale. Because you don’t win but rather lose your way to the Final Four, every team but the one that “wins” that dubious honor ends up with a really good feeling – surely a far better result that is achieved under the current method.

Of course, this version of a tournament calls for a rethinking of seeding as well. As it works in the current system, seeding tries to keep the best teams away from each other at the start, so they will not knock each other out until later rounds. This approach, like the win-or-die philosophy, needs to be stood on its head. Top seeds should play only other top seeds in the early rounds, bottom seeds only bottom seeds. The two top seeds play in the first game, and the winner goes home national champion. The others can still stay for the remaining fun.

Note that this proposal in no way undermines the integrity of the game; it would in no way be detrimental to players’ motivation – for instance, making them want to lose. The object is still to win; the game is the same. It’s just that the rewards are shared a bit better.

We might still need to discuss, of course, how the reward structure will work under this improved plan. The principal one, as I have said – ending the season on a win – will be shared by almost all. Maybe the trophy system will need adjusting: the biggest trophies for the first round, perhaps (to the team going home, of course), with declining statuettes down to the extremely modest tokens of achievement presented at the Final Four.

And yes, there is that one poor team left at the end of the Final Four. Even it those forlorn losers are hardly scapegoats in the classical sense (in which case they must take the blame for everyone else’s losses), since they genuinely get there on their own merits. At least these “winners” can be pleased they got to the Big Dance.

Besides, when you think about it, what’s wrong with scapegoats? Scapegoats have been crucial to human civilization since the beginning of time, and often they were sacred. One thing indeed which we Americans have no qualms about is scapegoating; we don’t have to prove our mettle on this one. Back to the good old US of A : isn’t a handful of miserable schmucks a small price to pay for sixty-three winners?

How can the NCAA resist the dizzying appeal of victory bonfires on sixty-three campuses? Not to mention the huge bonanza in t-shirt sales across the nation. It’s a whole new ball game, baby!