Hot Sauce presents: A beginner's guide to March Madness

source

Hi! My name is Sam, also known as Caitlin’s fiancée. I’m so excited that Caitlin and her sisters are letting me guest post this week! Allow me to introduce myself more completely. I study vocal performance just like my fiancée. We met at college not long after I returned from an LDS mission in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. I now live in Utah, but I was born in Arizona and there is still a big part of my heart reserved for the southwest (this is mainly manifest in my borderline obsession with Mexican food—hence the addition of ‘hot sauce’ to the blog’s title this week). I also love sports and today I’m going to tell you how you can learn to appreciate the greatest sporting event that God ever created—the NCAA Basketball Tournament (AKA March Madness).

I really do believe that March Madness is the best time of the year for sports fans. Maybe you already watch the tournament, but if you’ve never followed it or if you’ve never followed it in great depth you should start now because it’s the most romantic sporting event you could ever find. Now I’m not talking about the dinner-by-candlelight-and-a-movie-involving-Colin-Firth kind of romantic. I’m talking about the Henry-David-Thoreau-transcendentalist-stick-it-to-the-man kind of romantic. Allow me to explain:

In other sports, opportunities for winning the championship and chances to be seen on a big national stage are reserved for teams that have a lot of money. Football is a good example. Football costs a lot of money for a university and that’s why opportunities to win championship in football so often falls to schools like the University of Alabama (no offense Melanie) or the University of Oregon—schools who have donors who dump literally millions of dollars into the football team each year. Not so in college basketball. Anyone can make it into the tournament and have a shot at winning it all if they just win their conference tournament or show in other games throughout the season that they are worthy of spot in the tourney. Furthermore, an underdog team is more likely successful in this format because it only takes one win to eliminate the other team in this tournament, which is not always the case in other sports be they at the professional or college level. This win-or-go-home format allows the underdog teams to have a take-no-prisoners attitude that can propel them to victories over highly favored opponents.

Essentially, watching March Madness can be quite enjoyable. Here is a list of vocabulary words that will make you better acquainted with the subject and make your tournament watching more fun:

·      
        Bracket- Millions of fans print one of these out each year and use it to predict a winner for each game in the tournament. Once their bracket is filled out completely fans follow each juikgame in the tournament to see if their predictions were correct.

Free customizable/printable bracket found here

·      Bracketology-the science of filling out a bracket properly by predicting the right outcome of games. I included this term because it’s one that you might here, not because it’s a real thing. The term ‘bracketology’ really is just a perfect example of sports trying to act like they are more important than they actually are.

·      Seed- the tournament bracket is split into four regions. Each region has 16 teams. When the tournament selection committee picks which teams make it into the tournament, they assign each team in a given region a ranking (also known as a seed), which is indicated by a number printed next to each team on the bracket. So, the team with the 1 next to it was considered to be the best team in that group, the team with the 2 was considered to be the second-best, etc.

·      Upset-What takes place when a team with a relatively low seed defeats a team with a higher seed. Upsets happen regularly in the tournament. This makes it a lot of fun.

·      Cinderella-The nickname often given to underdog teams who make an unexpected run deep into the tournament.

·      The Big Dance- A nickname for the NCAA college basketball tournament

·      The Sweet Sixteen-The nickname given to the third round of the tournament in which there are only 16 teams remaining

·      The Elite Eight-The name given to the fourth round of the tournament in which there are only 8 teams remaining

·      The Final Four-The second-to-last round in the tournament in which only 4 teams remain.

I    

NCAA

      I hope this post has been helpful and that you will have a greater measure of understanding the next time your spouse, parent, sibling, or friend all of a sudden becomes glued to the TV when March comes around.

Mikki Platt Photography