This past Sunday marked “Selection Sunday” in the college basketball world. As a Duke student and Duke basketball fanatic, I believe it is my duty to spend the next 3 weeks of my life discussing every aspect of the upcoming NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship: “I know Wofford can knock Arkansas. They’ve shown they can hang with the big teams!”…”You’re crazy if you pick against Kentucky! What makes you think they’ll start losing now?!”
This obsession with predicting and over-analysis is reminiscent of the buildup to the World Cup. Just as in the soccer world when the World Cup begins, all eyes in the basketball universe shift to the NCAA tournament come the third week of March. TV personalities endlessly discuss who they think will succeed, who will come up short, and who could surprise observers. Both even devote a day (and a TV programs) during which the teams who will compete in the respective tournaments are placed into brackets that determine their competition schedule.
Although some individual events certainly capture the attention of whole countries (or the world), like the Super Bowl, the NCAA Tournament and World Cup are unique in that they garner significant amounts of viewers for roughly an entire month! If games are not being played, commentators are previewing upcoming contests and analyzing past ones.
So with that, I hope you all do not get tired of all the media coverage (I know I didn’t during the World Cup!), and may your brackets always be perfect!
