I filled out my bracket at the kitchen table Thursday night with a Bic pen and the printout from Murph’s, and the eleven-seed I circled has a $1.4 million NIL deal, three legal name changes on file with the NCAA compliance office, and a podcast called Off the Glass where he interviews other guys with podcasts. He is twenty-four years old. He has played for four schools. One of them was a junior college in Idaho that no longer exists, which I would like somebody to explain to me in plain English.
The pool at Murph’s has a title sponsor this year. A regional Toyota dealership in Hagerstown. There is a QR code in the corner of the bracket. If you win, your check arrives from a marketing agency in Charlotte and you are encouraged to post a thank-you video. I am not going to post a thank-you video. I am sixty-eight years old and the last video I posted was an accident involving the inside of my coat pocket and three minutes of an Applebee’s parking lot.
I used to love Cinderella. Cinderella was a kid named Petey Corrigan who came off the bench at George Mason and shot the lights out for one beautiful weekend in March because nobody had bothered to scout him. Cinderella now is a grad transfer with a goatee, a representation team, and a mid-major coach who recruited him with a USB drive of analytics. Cinderella has a Cameo page. Cinderella charges thirty-five dollars to wish your father a happy birthday and forty if your father is named Doug.
Coach DiMaggio used to say a tournament was a season inside a season, and the only thing that mattered was who showed up Thursday at noon with their shoes tied. He said this in 1982 in a cinder-block locker room that smelled like a lost cause. He would have hated the bracket app. He would have hated it the way he hated indoor stretching, college fight songs played by a recording, and any man who used the word journey about a sport.
Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday from his recliner in Altoona to ask if I’d seen what they were paying the kid at Saint Joseph’s. I had not. He told me. I made him repeat it. He said the kid had a logo. I said what kind of logo, like a clothing line, and Ray said no, like a personal logo, on his shoes, on a hat, on a press conference backdrop. I told Ray I was going to hang up and walk into the yard for a minute and he said that was probably the right move.
The transfer portal opened the same week as the conference tournaments, which I’m told is a normal thing now and not the punchline I keep mistaking it for. So a kid can play in a Sunday quarterfinal, lose a heartbreaker by two, hug his coach on the sideline, and be in another team’s group chat by Tuesday morning. They call this player empowerment. I call it the same thing I call a guy who leaves Murph’s the second his wife calls.
The selection committee, meanwhile, is twelve people in a hotel suite in Indianapolis with bowls of trail mix and a software platform that ranks teams by something called Net Quadrant Resume Score. I read the methodology. I read it twice. It is the kind of document a man writes when he has been told he is too valuable to coach and not valuable enough to be the athletic director. There is no Coach DiMaggio in that room. There is, I suspect, a Brad.
And yet. I will tell you what is true. The actual basketball, the forty minutes between the tip and the handshake, is still the best thing on television in March. A kid from a school you can’t pronounce will hit a runner with three seconds left on Friday and a fifty-year-old man in a sleep shirt will scream at his television loud enough that his dog will leave the room. That part hasn’t moved. They can sponsor the bracket and rename the trophy and put a betting line on the national anthem, and that part still hasn’t moved, which I take as evidence the sport is tougher than the people selling it.
Anyway. I’ve got Houston in the Final Four, against my better judgment, and an upset penciled in for the four-thirteen game because Ray told me to. Denise is bringing chili Saturday for the first round. She says the recipe is from a podcast. I didn’t ask which one.