The NCAA Basketball Tournament is here. Everyone has their two bucks in the hat and, over the next few days, they will see a few picks die away in the first round. Then they will see their sleeper Finals pick lose in the second round to Marquette. Of course, this team shouldn't lose to Marquette -- they are a better team and, if they played 20 games head-to-head, they would win at least 12 or 13 of them...
...But the NCAA Tournament is the most unfair of the major sporting events. A single elimination 64 team tournament does a lousy job of determining the true best team in the land. Most people admit this, but they also cannot deny that NCAA Tournament is an extremely exciting event.
The unfairness of the Tournament is really what makes it so fun. An off day could mean an off-season for a number 1 seed thinking Championship. The utter suddenness of a defeat and the end of a season, the end of a dream, is so cruel that it's beautiful.
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Contrast this to the NBA, which really aims to be fair. The seven game NBA Finals with home court advantage give a much better chance of producing the superior team. An off day means that you have to play better in the next game, not wait until next year.
Exceptions occur, of course. The best team doesn't always win. Houston's victory in 1994 was particularly lucky. No expert picked them to win and when they did, those experts insisted it was lucky. The '95 Rockets, too, were very lucky. They should were down 3 games to 1 to the Phoenix Suns in the Western Semi-Finals, but then came shots like Mario Elie's three pointer at the buzzer and the Rockets eked out a 4-3 series victory. In the Finals, Orlando was on their way to beating the Rockets in Game 1, but they allowed Houston all the way back from a 20 point deficit, then Nick Anderson missed four straight free throws in overtime to let Houston win and ultimately take the series.
There probably is some rationale for writing good rules of the game, but one of the factors must be allowing small mistakes to turn into big ones. It makes games memorable. Anderson's free throws qualify. So did Syracuse not covering Indiana's Keith Smart at the end of the 1987 NCAA Tournament, which cost me my Tournament pool. So did Oklahoma's not playing zone against Danny Manning and Kansas in 1988, which also cost me my Tournament pool. Of course, when Chris Webber called a timeout he didn't have, that qualified as a small mistake that became big and, once again, it cost me a Tournament pool.
I'm not bitter. Really.
I am a scientist and science is all about understanding the exceptions, the cases where small factors make measurable differences. James Gleick wrote a fine book about this effect, called Chaos. Chaos spells out how Mother Nature has given us "nonlinearities" that don't allow us to make perfect predictions. If it's raining in Pittsburgh and the weather is going east, this doesn't necessarily mean that it will be raining in New Jersey the next day. If someone turns on their air conditioning in Philadelphia, that could turn that weather front south or it could do nothing at all. The effect of that air conditioning could be very large or it could be minimal. (Mother Nature has also given us a particularly vexing nonlinearity known as Women, which are extremely unpredictable and a subject of many other books.)
Translating to basketball, a nonlinearity means that a two point basket has different value depending on when it happens. It can mean nothing if one team is leading by 20 points, but it can mean a win or loss if the two teams are separated by one point and one second on the clock. The value of two points depends on the details of the situation. Every basketball player wishes they could save some of the points from their best game for a game when they were more important. But they can't.
Life's not fair.
As you watch the NCAA Tournament over the next few weeks, you will revel in this unfairness, at least until your team gets upset. When that happens, then you can tune in to the NBA. There you can watch the Chicago Bulls rightfully win their fifth title of the decade.
The ABL ended their season on Tuesday night. The Columbus Quest fought back from a 2-1 deficit to win the series 3-2 over the Richmond Rage behind surprise hero, Valerie Still. You can find a full write-up of it at The Columbus Quest web site.
The WNBA starts their season in late June and they will actually have media coverage.