I have known the bracket since Tuesday. So have you. So has my mailman, my dentist, the woman who stocks the Pepsi at the gas station, and at least one of my grandchildren. CBS knows we know. CBS knows we know that CBS knows we know. And at six o’clock tonight CBS will roll out a two-hour broadcast pretending none of us has ever seen a basketball schedule, and we will sit there and let them.
Joe Lunardi has been publishing bracket projections since the leaves were still on the trees. By February the man had filed somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-seven brackets, each one varying from the last by exactly the seeding of one team from the Mountain West. By March he is essentially the bracket. The committee meets in a conference room in Indianapolis and follows along on his ESPN page. I am not entirely sure they bother with their own list anymore.
And yet the Selection Show, which used to last thirty minutes and consisted of a man with a marker drawing on a board, has now ballooned into something the network treats like the lunar landing. Two hours. Three hours if you count the pregame. Charles Barkley is involved somehow. Greg Gumbel, God rest him, used to read the bracket like he was reading a grocery list, and that was the right way to do it. Now we get dramatic music, we get teaser cuts, we get a man named Seth saying “buckle up, folks” before he reveals that Auburn is a one seed, which Auburn has been a one seed since January.
The worst innovation, by a country mile, is the Snub Segment. They put a camera in some poor mid-major’s gymnasium, a hundred kids in matching warm-ups holding pizza, and when the school doesn’t get called the camera lingers on a sophomore guard from Indianapolis trying not to cry on national television. This is presented as drama. This is presented as content. I don’t know what we did as a country to deserve being shown a teenager’s worst Sunday, but here we are, with a sideline reporter asking him how it feels.
Then they cut to the committee chair, who comes on looking like a deacon delivering bad news to a congregation. He uses words like “body of work” and “résumé” and “metrics suggested.” The committee chair is the Pope of college basketball for one Sunday a year, and he will, before the night is out, have to defend why a team from the Big East is a nine seed and not an eight, which is the kind of distinction that matters to exactly one fan base and exactly one gambling syndicate in New Jersey.
Ray Kowalczyk called me at four-fifteen this afternoon. Ray is a Marquette man, has been since 1962, and he wanted me to know that if Marquette gets a five seed and ends up in Spokane he is going to “raise hell.” I asked him with whom. He said he had not figured that part out yet. Ray will watch the show. Ray will yell at the show. Ray will then eat a sandwich and call me back.
My old coach, Coach DiMaggio, ran our school’s bracket pool on a legal pad. Twenty-five names, two dollars apiece, and he kept the cash in a Folgers can in the equipment shed. The whole operation took about six minutes. The pool would close before the play-in games — back when there were no play-in games, just sixty-four teams, the right number — and on Monday morning the pad would be pinned to the bulletin board outside the gym. Nobody filmed anybody crying. The bracket was the bracket. You won or you didn’t.
Somewhere in the middle of the third hour tonight, they will get around to previewing actual basketball. Maybe ninety seconds on a twelve-five upset pick. A graphic with arrows. Then back to four men in suits arguing about whether North Carolina deserved a bid, which they did not, and which the committee chair will have to recuse himself from, which is its own kind of comedy if you have the stomach for it.
I will watch all of it. I always do. The bracket is the bracket and the show is the show and complaining about the show is, at this point, part of the show. Petey Corrigan from the bowling alley will text me at seven-thirty asking who I have in the Final Four, and I will tell him the same four teams I tell him every year, and he will lose his pool to his nine-year-old niece, who picked by uniform color.
Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast.