March Madness is once again upon us and our Facebook feeds are abuzz with bitching and moaning about schools you don’t actually go to screwing up your bracket.
Lest I remind you that school pride is one thing, but wagering real money on other schools’ teams is just absurd. The animosity between people who have dedicated the entire month to this fake competition that means nothing is almost as bad as your Fantasy Football league.
Seriously.
You take people who are not and will never be on the same team and bet serious cash on their success? Now admittedly, I am the farthest thing from a “sporty” person. I quit playing softball to do theatre, so maybe I’m not the best person to comment on the logistics of this whole thing. But when you blow up my newsfeed lamenting about how “your bracket is fucked thanks to (insert D I school here),” I can’t help but roll my eyes.
“But Warren Buffett is offering $1 billion for a perfect bracket!” Yeah, and no one has EVER won that. Ever. Have you ever met someone with a perfect bracket? The odds are approximately one in 9 quintillion.
Quintillion, with a Q.
That is 9 followed by 18 zeros. So yeah, your argument is basically, “I’m going to spend x-amount of money on the abysmal, virtually nonexistent chance that the 4th richest man in the world will show up at my doorstep like a Publishers Clearing House rep and make my dreams come true.”
No, he won’t. Because you are not going to win. Play your bracket and lose your money, but please stop forcing me to hear about your losses for the entirety of my spring semester.
And don’t tell me to get off the Internet, because that won’t happen either.
Stop putting so much pressure on these poor kids, who are students just like you. Stop freaking out that 19 year olds are not conforming to your arbitrary selection of teams. And let’s be honest, if someone were to hand in a perfect bracket and collect all that dough, it’s not because you’re some basketball predicting protégé. You beat the odds with a lucky guess, and everyone will hate you for it. Including me.