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Before the Manifesto gets to its annual obsessive analysis over the March Madness field, let me just tell you the only two things you really need to know about this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament:

1. You’re a fool if you pick anyone other than Kentucky to win the NCAA title.
2. Kentucky is unlikely to win the NCAA title.

Now, if those two statements seem flatly contradictory, recall the abiding randomness of college sports. For example, last year, you may remember Shabazz Napier leading Uconn to the title (alternatively, you may choose not to remember this), but you probably don’t remember Uconn needing overtime to defeat St. Joseph’s in the first round. I’m not trying to diminish Uconn’s achievement (much as I’d like to); I’m just pointing out how incredibly hard it is to win six consecutive college basketball games in March. That’s what’s so crazy and so exciting about postseason tournaments, no matter the sport: The best team isn’t always the championship team. Read More

There’s a great throwaway scene in Major League when the immortal Bob Uecker is growing increasingly frustrated by the combination of the Indians’ poor play and the city’s utter disinterest in the team. He’s doing his solo radio show, and he knows nobody’s listening anyway, so when he struggles to locate the sponsor he’s supposed to be plugging, he just gives up: “Christ, I can’t find it. To hell with it!”

Well, that’s pretty much how I feel analyzing this year’s March Madness bracket. I didn’t watch quite as much college basketball in 2013–14 as in years past—which is to say that the number of hours I spent glued in front of my television dipped from “coma-inducing” to “merely socially unacceptable”—but I’d like to think I’m fairly knowledgeable about a fair number of the 68 teams competing for the national title. Yet at no point during this season did I watch a team and think to myself, “That squad is definitely making the Final Four.” Well, that isn’t strictly true, but the one team that did inspire those thoughts recently lost its second-best player—who has been repeatedly compared to Hakeem Olajuwon—to something called a “spinal stress fracture”. Thanks a lot, Joel Embiid; you just robbed the Manifesto of its one surefire Final Four pick. Read More

There’s a moving scene in the first season of “The West Wing” in which Toby convinces President Bartlet to cut from his State of the Union Address a line that reads, “The era of big government is over.” Toby admits that it’s a catchy slogan that will give Bartlet a bump in the polls, but he’s sickened at the thought of disparaging the federal machine solely to score political points. “Government can be a place where people come together and where no one gets left behind,” he pleads, and as string music swells to support the truth of his words, Bartlet turns to Josh Lyman and asks him what he thinks. Josh considers briefly, then answers, “I make it a point never to disagree with Toby when he’s right.”

March Madness, too, is a place where (or at least a time when) people come together. Pools are illegally filled out, Internet traffic booms, productivity stalls, and across the nation the conversation turns to whether Gonzaga really deserved a #1 seed, or whether Bucknell can flip the script on Butler. But while the era of big government may not be over, the era of top-tier dominance in college basketball is assuredly extinct. With the game’s most talented players fleeing for the NBA after a single season, collegiate teams struggle to build any sort of chemistry, as frustrated coaches ultimately allow scheme and strategy to yield to on-floor talent. (This also might explain why most close games are invariably decided by either (a) free-throw shooting, or (b) a final possession in which the team’s best player dribbles for 25 seconds, then heaves up a step-back, off-balance three-pointer.) Setting aside Gonzaga (a team with its own unique set of question marks), every legitimate contender for the 2013 title has lost at least five games. There’s just no such thing as an elite team anymore. Read More

There’s a compelling scene in The Dark Knight in which Bruce Wayne decides to give up. The Joker has terrorized Gotham City so brutally and efficiently that its citizens have turned on Batman, their once-unassailable protector, demanding that he turn himself in. And Wayne – exhausted, bloodied, beaten – concludes that yielding and revealing himself as the Caped Crusader is the only possible solution against a foe as demented and inexorable as The Joker. But Alfred, his unwavering, loyal butler, disagrees. “People are dying, Alfred,” Wayne laments. “What would you have me do?” Alfred’s response:

“Endure.”

Endurance has been the defining characteristic of New York Knicks fans for more than a decade. Ever since Jeff Van Gundy abruptly resigned in 2001, rooting for the Knicks has been a singularly grueling experience, a twisted Orwellian experiment in which the sports overlords sadistically push a fan base to its limits just to discover how much pain it can tolerate in the name of devotion to a fucking sports team. We’ve endured Isiah Thomas running the franchise like a nine-year-old hell-bent on acquiring the overpriced green properties in Monopoly (Steve Francis! Jalen Rose! Quentin Richardson!). We’ve endured Larry Brown browbeating rookies and shelving young talent in favor of “veteran leaders” like Qyntel Woods and Malik Rose. We’ve endured Jerome James’ contract ($29 million, or $130,000 for every point he scored as a Knick). We’ve endured Renaldo Balkman’s draft selection, Stephon Marbury’s meltdown, Eddy Curry’s Shawn Kemp-esque weight gain, Walt Frazier’s insipid commentary, and countless other indignities. Read More

This year, the NCAA Tournament committee is finally disclosing its “Seed List”, in which it ranks every team that made the tourney from 1 through 68. In terms of generating Internet traffic, this won’t exactly be the Starr Report or casting news from The Hunger Games, but it’s still guaranteed to get thousands of basketball nerds salivating. Yet the mere acknowledgement that such a list even exists reveals a grave problem with postseason collegiate basketball: March Madness is deeply unfair.

Look, I love March Madness – it’s unequivocally my favorite sporting event of the year. And in terms of amateur athletics, I probably shouldn’t be griping about basketball’s system given that college football could have a Planet-of-the-Apes-level uprising on its hands at any moment. But that doesn’t change the fact that the current bracketing system, while numerically satisfying and visually sexy, is prone to wildly illogical results. Read More