Troubling March Madness byproduct: a boom in 'bracketology'
The mix of math, basketball stats, and guts is raising concerns among addiction counselors, sociologists, and the NCAA itself.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 30, 2007 edition
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ATLANTA - It started with a $5 pool as the Midwestern high schooler filled out a bracket of teams he predicted would climb to the Valhalla of college basketball: the Final Four.
His run ended before he graduated from college last May, when he had to pay the mafia $25,000 to lay off his family and himself. What happened? Given the prospect of easy money, his own smarts, and plenty of time to watch sports on TV, he'd become the dorm bookmaker, carrying $100,000 a month in bets, encroaching on established local rackets.
It's an extreme tale, but a cautionary one as the growing mania around "bracketology" – the mix of math, stats, and guts used to bet on which teams make it to the championship round – is raising concern among addiction counselors, sociologists, and the NCAA itself.
At the same time, bracketology has moved out of sports bars and cubicle mazes and into university math labs. There, Pythagorean theorems are leveraged against Joakim Noah's stats and the dynastic influence of Patrick Ewing Jr. on the Georgetown squad to draw math-wary students into problems that matter to them.
"[Bracketology] cuts as deep sociologically as anything I can come up with," says Tim Otteman, a researcher at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, a perch from where he gathered the real-life story about the college bookie who ran afoul of the mob. "It's almost a runaway train that can't be stopped."
After the NCAA established the national bracket of 64 teams (later 65) in 1985, the office pool existed chiefly among sports-crazy working men who pasted their cubicles and favorite sports joints with printed brackets. In essence, bettors receive an ascending number of points for each round that their chosen teams advance, all the way up to the champion. The one with the most points at the end takes the pool. Across America, brackets are right now either falling apart or holding steady as the Final Four – Georgetown, Florida, Ohio State, and UCLA – march to Atlanta this weekend.
Today, social networking sites such as Facebook have added brackets, and many of the some 2,200 gambling sites offer their own versions. The NCAA estimates that 1 out of 10 Americans placed at least one wager on a bracket this year. A growing number are women and nonsports fans.
"I would say bracketology is a social phenomenon," says Jack Salisbury, an avid bracketologist and a Stanford University undergrad. "There's a girl in my dorm who I'm pretty sure is not into basketball, and she's coming into my room at 10 a.m. asking, 'Did Georgia Tech beat UNLV, do you know?' "
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