I first became a college basketball junkie during the 1981-1982 season. I was living in West Tennessee at the time, we got all our news out of Memphis, and the Memphis State Tigers, as they were known then, were on the ascendancy. That spring I was first exposed to the Big Dance, March Madness, Bracketology, otherwise known as the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament.
The Tigers made it to the Sweet 16 that year, and the next year, and the next, and finally punched their way to the Final Four in 1985. By then, I was locked in as a Tiger fan for life, and would eventually attend Memphis State and graduate in 1994. (My claim to fame is that I had a world history class with Penny Hardaway. I should have gotten his autograph when I had the chance.) In other words, not every Tennessean bleeds orange, although, living where I do, I am but one blue dot in an orange world.
The NCAA tournament is perhaps the most popular sporting event in the country. The Super Bowl draws a larger audience, but that’s only one game. March Madness consists of 64 games played during a three-week period that involves, in theory, the best 65 college basketball teams in the nation.
One of the reasons the tournament has become so popular is that fans can easily get involved. Anyone can fill out a set of brackets. There’s a science behind it. You can even go online and participate in various pools. During the first four days of the tournament, there are 48 games. It’s wall-to-wall hoops from morning to night. There’s hardly time to sleep.
College basketball is one of the most exciting sports on the planet, far more exciting than the NBA, and far more unpredictable than college football. Every tournament provides an endless highlight reel. Usually the better team wins. But sometimes a Cinderella team bursts onto the scene and beats a team or two it wasn’t supposed to. (Last year, Belmont University very nearly toppled the Duke Blue Devils.) Some of the games are blowouts. Others aren’t decided until the last second or two, like when the Memphis Tigers handed away the national championship to Kansas a year ago, leaving Right Minded emotionally scarred to this day.
March Madness provides a much-needed diversion from politics, which can be down-right depressing at times. Still, I can’t help but compare March Madness to our political world. March Madness is a conservative’s dream. There are clear winners, and the winners are actually rewarded for their achievement, while losers must deal with the sting of defeat. Believe me, the farther along you get in the tournament, the more it hurts when you lose.
We live in a nation that is currently governed exclusively by liberals. As such, hard work doesn’t pay off as it used to, achievement is chastised, and wealth is looted and pillaged. Losers are “rewarded” with government dependence at the expense of the winners.
Those of us who make achievement a priority look at those who have already achieved and try to learn from them. Liberals, on the other hand, look at achievers and seek to punish them. This is how they “reward” the losers. It’s called class warfare, the politics of envy.
Many Americans hang on President Obama’s every word. They love it when he talks about punishing the wealthy, when he talks about “fairness,” when he scolds the achievers and demands that they be the ones to sacrifice.
Yet sports fans from across the entire political spectrum are captivated by March Madness, even though the tournament is antithetical to liberalism. There is no room for lofty oration, because words don’t win basketball games. There is no such thing as “fairness,” because the team with the most points at the final buzzer is always the winner. Whereas the politics of envy dictates that winners must be punished, everybody loves a winner on the basketball court. Whereas liberals have largely removed the incentives that encourage hard work and achievement in the free market, hard work and achievement pave the path to the Final Four.
Given that President Obama and the Democrats have done everything in their power to destroy wealth, the topsy-turvy world of college basketball seems stable and sane compared to the political world of 2009. Indeed, the real March Madness is what’s going on in Congress right now. (It’s a good thing Congress doesn’t run the NCAA.)
One of the things I’ve learned after years of watching sports is that the sports media are just like the rest of the media. They believe they are smarter than everyone else, yet they also have their own biases, which they can sometimes barely conceal. But at the end of the day, even after the most intelligent analyses, the sports media don’t know any better than the rest of us the eventual makeup of the Final Four. My eleven-year-old can fill out a set of brackets, and be no less accurate than the best sports analysts in the country. That’s because college basketball is so unpredictable.
By now, the field of 65 has been reduced to 16. Your brackets are hanging on the refrigerator door. You’ve circled the winners and marked out the losers. You’re so involved in the tournament that not even your 401(k) statement can depress you. Hopefully, your Final Four are still intact. Hopefully, you were wise enough to pencil in the Memphis Tigers as one of them.
