Of March and Madness and all the other pairs
Madness and March have been with us ever since the hare stuffed the dormouse into the teapot, so there is no disputing its existence. How it came to have anything to do with college basketball is less literary and can be blamed on alliteration.
Actually March Madness was stolen from the Illinois high school playoffs, but that’s another column.
This one is about why we have a Final Four, instead of, oh, I don't know, a Last Few or A Couple A Pairs at the End.
Why there is an Elite Eight and a Sweet Sixteen. Why there is a Selection Sunday (this would not work on another day because it would have to be Wowwie Wednesday or Funky Friday, not that there is anything wrong with either).
It is not clear why this stops at Four, why there is no Terrific Two or Only One. Four somehow has established itself as the mystical amount.
Other sports reduce themselves to fours also, but without the vision to call them Final. They call them Semi-Final, more accurate but poetically inadequate.
Baseball has division winners, football has conference contenders, pro basketball has LeBron and others.
The Olympics stop at three and call them medalists. The fourth-best modern pentathlete, consequently, will not even print the disgrace on his business card.
It is only in college basketball that being one of four is so greatly admired and even being one of 68 can set off howls of joy.
The NCAA's geography is always so curious you wonder if it is a required course at member institutions. The familiar direction of North is ignored in favor of Midwest. South, East and West are allowed to remain on the compass, except for the basketball's tendency to put the word Big in front of them.
This rather divides the nation like an hourglass and assumes that no basketball at all is played near New Hampshire.
Thus, for regional tournament purposes, we now find that Illinois is in the East, North Carolina is in the West, Oregon is in the Midwest and Nebraska is in the South.
Out of this dizzying arrangement will come the honored Final Four, to rendezvous in suburban Phoenix, which by then will be thoughtfully where we left it, somewhere south of Las Vegas.
The Madness signifies that nothing that happens in college basketball means anything until March. Conference tournaments are for money, not entry into the next tournament. The regular season is so teams with hyphens can play teams with ampersands.
The next logical step is simply to let every team into the Madness, and that may eventually happen. It would require only one more week of scheduling, the week now used to play the conference tourneys.
What is precious about college basketball is that neither my opinion nor the selection committee's matter, since all of this will be resolved in early April, as yet without a tag. I suggest Angry April and am applying for a copyright.
What is particularly maddening is the contradiction that the NCAA offers by seeding its teams according to expectation. This is a bookmaker's word. This is also the essence of the tournament and what is largely responsible for its popularity, why an Oakland can be forgiven for bursting brackets by upsetting a Kentucky.
The NCAA provides the framework for easy gambling, and that is why folks who have no idea whether Gonzaga is a team or an ointment are willing to spend three weeks watching other people's tall children.
The look of March Madness is not dissimilar to the glazed preoccupation of someone feeding coins into the dollar slots.
Point spreads arrived at objectively are no less suspicious than the logic that goes into the tournament selections, and both sides are working from essentially the same data pool.
Establishing regional seeds is the same as making a point spread, and the NCAA is so against that sort of thing that it once considered withholding media credentials for any organization that provided point spreads to its audience.
The NCAA changed its mind, realizing that its press conferences would be attended only by correspondents from The Art of Eating and Farm Implements Illustrated, both honorable publications.