March Madness - Day One

I hesitate to write about day one of March Madness because nobody likes listening to or in this case reading about bad beats. Just like in poker where nobody really cares that your aces were cracked by some donkey holding jack, nine offsuit - does anyone really care that you decided that this will be the year that you take all the underdogs just to see almost all the favorites cover? Nobody cares that your two teams in knock-out pools are already out and the tournament is just 24-hours old. Nobody cares that you really liked the over (123) in the Old Dominion - Butler game only to see neither team score 20 points in the first half. Nobody cares that you really liked Vanderbilt but because you hesitated and the game started 15 minutes early - you couldn't get it in. Nobody cares that you thought the Duke game would be close but you felt that there was no way Duke would lose so that you teased them down from 6 points down to 2. Nobody really cares to listen about these things. People are only really concerned with their own picks.

That won't stop millions of people from telling anyone who will listen their first day NCAA bad beat stories. Just you wait. How many people will be telling you about how Duke ruined their bracket? (I actually had Duke losing to Pittsburgh in the next round - so my brackets are OK.)

That's the dirty little secret about the NCAA men's basketball tournament. It really isn't about who wins except for the final game or Cinderella stories like George Mason last year. It's about who loses and how they screwed up your brackets or how they ruined your parlay bet. Even the Cinderella stories are drown out by stories by people who had their brackets busted because they had the team Cinderella beat making the Final Four.

Maybe that's the secret to the success of the popularity of March Madness - misery loves company.