No matter who you are you will most likely fill out a bracket this year for March Madness. Why? Why are we as a society so fascinated with using brackets for just one week of the year? It just seems so strange to me. Why do we fill out brackets?
You see in the sports world we use brackets for everything. Brackets are a fascination in every sport for ever sports fan. That is not a shock, but why does everyone get so involved in March Madness? From sports fan to artist, we all fall in love with brackets for a week. Is it because we feel peer pressure? Are we addicted? Is the bracket just some drug that we all get hooked on? A sports writer’s cocaine, if you will. Everyone fills out a bracket and we get so sucked in by the fact everyone else is doing it that we just decide to go along with it.
Mother always told us if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you? Well in the case of brackets mom damn right we would. People who know nothing about college basketball get deep into the addiction of clicking a team all the way to the finals and may never even watch the tournament. Perhaps this is because perfection is fleeting. No one, no one ever has had a perfect bracket recorded in the history of humanity. We are constantly searching for that fleeting dragon. We will never catch the high of a perfect bracket, but there’s a chance so we fill out 10 brackets.
Do we get sucked in by peer pressure? The answer is absolutely positivity, I would guess that almost half the work places in America have a bracket pool. Which is odd because America has forever been constantly anti betting but that’s a story for another day. If your boss asks you if your joining the bracket group are you really going to say no? Of course, you aren’t going to turn that down.
If it sounds like I’m anti bracket, I’m not. I am a college basketball junky and already have filled out 8 brackets across three different platforms and I will probably make more. I just wonder why we get so wrapped up in them. Why don’t we use brackets for non-sports matters? Why don’t we come together every election year and put together a presidential bracket? People are certainly opinionated enough about politics that it would work. Why not with music? Why not with food? There are so many things that you can put in brackets that we simply do not.
We get sucked in by March by the societal Madness of the tourney. No other tourney gets this kind of bracket attention not even by sports fans, we care more about March Madness because the rest of our society cares more about March. It’s just a fascinating question that we may never answer but guess what we will still fill out the bracket and we will still enter our office pools and still be heart broken in the first round when Iona beats Duke. Fill out your brackets responsibly people and enjoy March!
If you want some awesome bracket breakdowns by me and some other very talented authors look no farther than PSF.