Whether they’re highly anticipated rematches…
RYAN RUOCCO (during the Iowa v. LSU game on April 1, 2024): Clark evades, that will do it… this time, it’s Iowa!
…or unanticipated upsets…
IAN EAGLE (during the NC State v. Duke game on March 31, 2024): This is what dreams are made of! An unlikely run to the Final Four for NC State!
March Madness always produces many unforgettable moments. And each year, millions of Americans create their own brackets to predict who will win as the nation’s best NCAA Division I basketball teams go head to head in single-elimination matchups.
For both the men’s and women’s tournaments, no one has ever made a verified perfect bracket with correct guesses for all 63 games. But it’s still fun to try.
If you’re a casual sports viewer like me, you may have frantically looked through ESPN’s summaries of each team’s performance… and then you may have changed some of your picks just for fun.
If you’ve been following the teams all season, then you may be like Matt Lesnik, a freshman majoring in broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University. Maybe, like him, you’ve made lots of brackets.
MATT LESNIK: Some of them will be themed, but a lot of them are focused on, you know, trying to make the best picks analytically. I do base stuff more off of that. However, there are some times I’ll kind of just go in and be like, “I feel like this team is gonna win,” and I’ll pick them.
But not everyone is as analytical as Lesnik. Claire Conner is a Medill freshman who co-hosts the SportsVoice each Sunday at 8 here on WNUR 89.3 FM. She’s been following the teams throughout the season, but one of her friends chose winners based on which cheeses they sounded like.
CLAIRE CONNER: She thought that “Gonzaga” sounded like “gorgonzola” and she loves gorgonzola, so she picked Gonzaga and they won. I picked Gonzaga because I thought they were gonna win the game and continue to win games, which they did until they faced Purdue, which is one of the best teams in the country and I would argue absolutely a better team than Gonzaga. But it just goes to show that, you know, there are a bunch of ways that you can fill out a bracket.
There’s both an art and a science in predicting how teams will be seeded for the bracket, a process known as bracketology. This year, Northwestern’s men’s basketball team was a nine seed. Medill junior Iggy Dowling, former editor in chief of Inside NU, says that many factors influenced this decision.
IGGY DOWLING: From the beginning it was like, “Oh, Northwestern is a team that’s probably going to make it back near the back half of the bracket.” They were being set as a seven or eight seed early on. But then, obviously, two guys get hurt: Ty Berry and Matthew Nicholson, who are two of their starters. And that presented a pretty interesting case because the committee does actually take into account injuries when it comes to seed line.
Lesnik says that going to college helped him and his peers consider more factors when analyzing potential brackets.
LESNIK: I feel like this is the year where people started really looking at quad one victories and how important is it that you beat these good teams on the road as opposed to at home? The level of analysis, I feel like it was much more prevalent this year.
Lower-seeded teams can tango their way far into the tournament. As a New Jerseyan, I’ve always been partial to Saint Peter’s Cinderella run in the 2022 men’s tournament, when they became the first 15 seed ever to reach the Elite Eight. And this year, millions were captivated by the 11th-seeded North Carolina State dancing all the way to the Final Four.
Upsets have historically been rarer in the women’s tournament. Some analysts have linked this trend to top seeds having a home-court advantage in early rounds. Others have discussed a historical lack of parity in women’s basketball, with top players being concentrated in a few teams.
That parity is slowly increasing. Nevertheless, this year’s Elite Eight consisted entirely of one and three seeds.
CONNER: It’s, yeah, fewer upsets, but at the same time, I think that there’s still so much passion there. Paige Bueckers is one of the greatest athletes of her generation along with all of the others that I’ve mentioned, and, like, even if I’m not watching UConn because they’re some dark-horse upset team, they’re obviously a phenomenal women’s basketball program and they have been for decades.
Several games in this year’s women’s tournament broke viewership records. Many featured the Iowa Hawkeyes, led by Caitlin Clark. And while players like Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese are heading to the WNBA next year, there will still be plenty of star power in women’s basketball.
DOWLING: You’re gonna have some of these established stars come back. Flau’jae Johnson from LSU is a really good example. People are gonna know who she is because she may not be going to the WNBA next year, but people watched that game, people saw her play really well, and if she’s doing crazy things on the court where she’s a superstar and you have these players from other schools — if there are superstars driving the way and they market themselves where well in their teams and their agencies market themselves well, I think that attracts people.
Whether you’re rooting for the established blue bloods, the lovable underdogs, or your hometown favorites, March Madness has something for everyone.
CONNER: I was rooting for Oakland to beat Kentucky, even though I had Kentucky going very far in my bracket. I don’t think people need to root for their brackets. I think a bracket is a fun way to kind of have a vision for the tournament and maybe put some of what you know about college basketball teams out there. But at the end of the day, I’m still gonna root for those upsets or root for the teams that I care about.
LESNIK: You think back to when we were younger, we always were just excited for our teachers to turn on the game in the class and, just, it would waste time. But I feel like every generation is going to get to experience something like that, or at least I would hope so ‘cause, I mean, it was awesome. For me, that excitement is never really gonna run out.
For WNUR News, I’m Edward Simon Cruz.
[“Save the Last Dance for Me” by Michael Bublé]
Audio used: Iowa v. LSU (April 1, 2024), NC State v. Duke (March 31, 2024), and “Save the Last Dance for Me” by Michael Bublé
