Constable: Why Libertyville man hand-draws his own NCAA brackets
More than 40 million people fill out brackets for the NCAA men's basketball tournament, the annual March Madness obsession that includes last-second shots, unbelievable upsets and a Sweet 16 that gets narrowed down to a Final Four today.
But nobody fills out a bracket quite like accountant Luke Lukens, 65, a former Libertyville trustee, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Sasser Family Holdings, and the 2014 Chicago CFO of the Year.
Spread across his kitchen table, Lukens' meticulous ledger sheets chart 40 years of tournament brackets. His hand-drawn 2016 bracket adorns the side of a kitchen cabinet, designed specifically for that purpose. Lukens actually has been charting the tournament by hand for 41 years.
“I didn't keep that first chart because I was a little disappointed in the outcome,” notes
Lukens, who got his bachelor's degree from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. In his first year of charting the tourney, his 1975 Indiana Hoosiers lost a heartbreaker, 92-90, to archrival Kentucky in a regional game to decide the Final Four.
Having grown up in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, Lukens rooted for the Kentucky Wildcats as a boy, and he still has a soft spot for some things from that school. His wife of 38 years, Ann, is a 1973 graduate of
Kentucky.
“We have fun with it,” Ann Lukens says of the basketball rivalry between her Wildcats and her husband's Hoosiers.
“Periodically, I will appease my wife and put Kentucky in blue,” says Lukens, who always charts IU's progress in red ink to match the school colors and stand out from all the schools written in black.
Newspapers print the NCAA bracket every spring, and myriad websites allow fans to pick teams and follow the outcomes instantaneously with no fuss. That won't work for Lukens.
“That's random,” he says, his face souring at the thought of brackets starting from both sides of a page and with no logic as to where his favorite team is listed. “I don't want random. I want control.”
It takes him an hour or so to draw the
brackets for each tourney.
“Indiana is at the top or the bottom each year,” he says, depending on whether the team is highly rated or must climb to a championship from a lower seeding. “As a kid, I was a frustrated draftsman working for my dad in the construction business. When I left public accounting, I had these pads of paper.”
Tournaments in the late 1970s featured just 32 teams. This year's tourney features 68 teams.
“Because the tournament size grew, the paper had to grow. Thirteen columns isn't big enough to get every team on, so I have to cut and paste,” Lukens says. He isn't talking about the computerized cutting and pasting that you might do in an Excel document. He uses scissors and rubber cement (or in recent years, adhesive tape) to extend his sheets of 11-by-17-inch ledger paper.
“My kids say, 'Dad, I can't believe you kept all of that.' Well, of course I did,” Lukens says.
He watched the 1976 Final Four games in Philadelphia, when his undefeated Hoosier team crushed Michigan in the championship game 86-68 behind Coach Bobby Knight.
“I interviewed Bobby Knight for his job,” says a grinning Lukens. As a member of the Student Athletic Board while attending college, Lukens officially played a small part in Knight's hiring in the fall of 1971. Just as Indiana basketball had to change after firing Knight in 2000, Lukens has added details to his charts, including seeding positions.
“In 1981, I started adding the scores,” Lukens says, noting that was the year his Hoosiers beat North Carolina for the national championship by a score of …
“We can look it up,” says Lukens, pulling out his slightly yellowed 35-year-old bracket to confirm that his Hoosiers won 63-50.
“And 1987 is the year Keith Smart hit that shot to beat Syracuse,” Lukens says, looking at his ledger to confirm the 74-73 victory and another IU championship.
“He doesn't need Google,” says neighbor and friend Connie Kowal, a Western Illinois University graduate, who, like every alum of a school from the state of Illinois, was shut out from the NCAA tourney this year.
When Indiana beat Kentucky 73-67 last weekend, Kowal watched the game at the Lukens' house so he could make sure Luke and Ann behaved during the rivalry game.
“Connie came in wearing his referee shirt,” Luke Lukens says. “We were civil to each other, but I have to admit I did gloat a little.”
Future chances to gloat ended Friday night when the Hoosiers lost 101-86 to North Carolina.
“It was the last game of the night, but I got up and wrote it down,” Lukens says. He and his Hoosiers now are spectators, same as his wife and her Wildcats. But both their teams fared better than those from colleges of their children.
Becky Griesemer, who lives in Arlington Heights and graduated from Bradley University, saw her team make it to the Sweet 16 in 2006, but Bradley hasn't been invited to the tournament since 2008.
Michael Lukens graduated from Murray State, a school that has gone to the tourney 15 times but won only three first-round games.
As much time as he spends drawing the brackets, Lukens never spends much time selecting his choice to win it all.
“If Indiana is in the tournament. I pick them,” says Lukens, who says he'll still watch and chart through the end of the tournament. “We're not just Indiana or Kentucky fans. We're basketball fans.”