March Madness and Why We Root (Even When Our Team Isn’t Playing)

Sports are irrational. No, scratch that—sports are a fine, healthy enterprise. It’s sports fandom that makes no sense. There are plenty of advantageous reasons to engage in athletic endeavors, competitive or otherwise. It’s healthy, and it hones strategic thinking skills. Plus it’s fun. Humankind has played competitive games since the dawn of recorded history, and almost certainly much longer. Even animals in the wild race and wrestle for entertainment.

But rooting? Investing ourselves emotionally in the competitive fates of people we don’t know, in silly games, the results of which will not affect us at all? It’s illogical behavior. Surely there is an innate thrill in observing the practice of a highly specialized skill. We enjoy watching dancers, listening to musicians, following the tales of storytellers. On that level, it can be mesmerizing to watch a man jump higher than most are able or fling an object through a small target repeatedly. For a more dramatic effect, we often prefer to see two such performers—or best of all, two entire teams—each striving to practice their skill better than the other, while simultaneously trying to disrupt their fellow performers in their similar pursuit. Now we have conflict. Hence, we have drama. We have storytelling.

And in most stories, there are heroes and there are villains. So we mentally cast our competitors accordingly and proceed to pull for the good guy. How do we decide who is who? Oh, geography, perhaps. Or superficial details like uniform colors or funny mascots. Or maybe we pull for State U because we went there. Or our Dad did. Or that one fella we used to know, what’s-his-name. Great guy. Go State.

But what if neither team is from our school? What is our favorite team isn’t playing and we’re left with a neutral contest, one in which we have no connection to the participants whatsoever? Why do we sports fans still care so much who wins? Why do we still insistently place the white hat upon the crown of one competitor and hope he wears it to glory? It’s because these athletes, through the improvised stories they tell us, come to represent so much more than players in a game. We view these contests as metaphors for life and society. In these teams, we perceive parallels to social communities, philosophies, even entire cultures. And in their quests, we see the very battle between good and evil. It’s completely irrational. But humans are not rational beings.

This past weekend, in the 2014 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, affectionately called “March Madness,” perennial powerhouse Duke lost to tiny upstart Mercer. And as Eric Idle would say, there was much rejoicing. Sports enthusiast across the nation, most of whom had never previously heard of Mercer, celebrated gleefully. For decades, Duke has been the great villain in the story of college basketball. Duke wins a lot of games, sure, but that’s not why they’re vilified. Seemingly overly populated with kids of wealthy upbringing, with few memorable players from low-income areas or unstable homes, Duke comes off like a private club for CEO’s kids. Its much-lauded coach, unlike many of his colleagues, seems to show little interest in recruiting troubled teens to experience the formative and redemptive powers of sports.

And because this is America, where issues of economic class are unavoidably linked to those of race, there’s something else uncomfortable about Duke squads. There’s no way around it—Duke has a lot of white players. A lot of good white players. Every year. In a sport that many, many black kids play and play well. Other expensive, academically elite schools compete at a high level, but the teams from Georgetown or Stanford usually appear as diverse as most teams they play. And other schools, like BYU, regularly field largely white teams, but they don’t dominate. This fits with our modern sense of justice—diversity in a workforce indicates a wide, unbiased talent search, which should increase an organization’s chance of excellence. But Duke doesn’t seem to suffer in performance for limiting its talent pool.

Adding to that is the ever-growing popular perception that Duke receives special treatment from officials, administrators, television personalities, and others in positions of influence. Fairly or not, every year sees more entries added to the grand mythical list of egregious favoritism, from horrible referee whistles, to questionable NCAA decisions, to unbridled Dookie enthusiasm from broadcasters.

So to the common-man sports fan, Duke represents the preening, exclusive, elitist cabal that he’ll never be invited to join. It’s the country club, the corporate board room, the clique of rich kids with fancy cars. Duke is the power and the privilege, the lake house party to which you’re not invited. And like any truly detestable foil, Duke always seems to be on top, living the good life, grinning smugly without guilt or shame. In Duke, we see every spoiled, undeserving, selfish asshole we’ve ever come across. 

But in the Mercers of the sporting world, we see ourselves. It’s the classic everyman tale, as old as legends themselves: a small band of dedicated souls, pure of heart, somehow overcomes great obstacles to defeat a much more powerful enemy. What allows our heroes to accomplish the impossible? Why, the human spirit, of course. The X-factor. That which cannot be measured, and cannot be squelched. It’s the mysterious, magical force which leads the righteous to victory. These stories give us hope, and reinforce everything we want to believe about life.

Which is why it hurts so badly when it goes the other way. And it does, often. Duke teams win a lot—many, many games every year, a championship every so often. And they have to, otherwise their comeuppance at the hands of a Mercer wouldn’t feel so good. The mighty must be mighty in order for the triumph of the meek to hold meaning.

Two days after the big Mercer win, Wichita State fell to Kentucky. To the uninitiated, the game might have seemed like an upset, another feel-good story. Undefeated Wichita State was seeded first, while Kentucky, losers of several games, was seeded 8th. But sports fans know better. Kentucky is basketball royalty, one of the crown-jewel programs of the sport, with decades of success and multiple championships. In recent years, the Wildcats have come to epitomize everything wrong with college sports. 

About a decade ago, the National Basketball Association adopted a rule that stipulates that a player must be 19 years old or have completed one year of college in order to play in the league. Though the rule was intended to prevent players from skipping college altogether, it has created a bizarre and troubling phenomenon, whereby most of the best prospects play only a single year of college ball before jumping the pros. To many fans, the de-facto “one and done” rule, as it’s derisively known, makes a mockery of higher education, and produces a watered-down version of basketball—on both the amateur and professional levels.

Many top programs have used these “super freshmen.” But none have taken advantage of the system like Kentucky. Captained by a slick, fast talking, multi-million dollar coach, a man with a lengthy record of recruiting violations at other schools, the Wildcats have repeatedly showcased entire starting lineups of one-and-done pro draft prospects. They are there for basketball, nothing else. This is not about school, and it’s not about amateur athletics. It’s big business, and they act like it. In a way, Kentucky’s brazen attitude is refreshing; at least we are spared any hypocritical talk of valuing education or tradition. Other schools are known to at least pretend to care. Not Kentucky. In 2012, they won a championship with a nearly all-freshman roster. This season, Kentucky brought in their most celebrated class yet, and was pegged as number 1 by the media before the season even began. Then this collection of young, entitled hotshots proceeded to lollygag through the season, losing many more games than expected. They played as if they should be handed victories based on talent alone.

Wichita State is a small school, a “mid-major” in the parlance of college sports—not the type of team typically considered a power. The Shockers don’t have the budget or the capacity to run a Kentucky-style basketball factory. And to their credit, they don’t seem to be interested in doing so. By sheer will and tenacity, and years of hard work—basically all the elements we look for in our heroes—Wichita State has built a winning team. A veteran team, full of junior and seniors. A high-functioning group of mutually supportive colleagues, working together, complementing one another. A true team, bucking the cynical one-and-done trend. They’re the little guys who can, the Hickory Huskers, Rocky Balboa, the rebels from Star Wars. And this year, they were trying to pull off the unthinkable: a perfect season, something that hasn’t been done in almost 40 years.

When these two teams clashed in the tournament, we neutral fans wanted the Shockers to win because it would validate so much of what we want to believe—that hard work beats entitlement; that the pure of heart will outlast the greedy. That the little guy can make it to the top. But it didn’t go that way. Kentucky won. In a tremendous, heart-stopping contest, the powerful prevailed. The good guys went home. And we care. It hurts. It bothers us because we don’t like what it says about life. If we’re going to consider the Mercer triumph as confirmation of any great truth, then we must consider the Wichita State loss as equally significant. Which it is, because the truth is that sometimes the little guy loses. Sometimes the other army just has too many arrows.

But that’s not, of course, the most important truth. The real deal is this: it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter who wins. A ball goes through a hoop or it doesn’t. The ball has no morality. When the “good guys” lose, it hurts because we ascribe meaning to it. Just as we cry when a beloved character dies in a story, feeling real emotion for a make-believe person, we mourn when our hero fails in the improvised story of a game. But just as we draw lessons from stories, morals to adhere to in our own journeys, so must we consider the sports fan experience. The final step in enjoying the game is to realize that it’s only a game, and that any parallel to our lives is only metaphorical. We crave justice in our stories, and in our sports. But true justice lies within.