The second-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes entered the second round of the women’s N.C.A.A. The Creighton Bluejays were heavily favored to win the basketball tournament. Iowa’s point guard Caitlin C Clark was the best player on court. She led the country in assists and points. Iowa had the home-court advantage with almost 15,000 fans expecting to see a Hawkeye victory that would take them to the Sweet 16.
Instead, they saw Creighton rise to the top, a team ranked 32nd (Iowa was 13th). They beat the Hawkeyes. Clark missed every shot she took in the second half, and Creighton — led by Lauren Jensen, who transferred from Iowa to Creighton — won the game.
Iowa had the winning narrative — a team that’s been great all year, a team that won the Big Ten Tournament merely two weeks before, a team that probably would beat Creighton if given another chance. But it won’t have that chance.
Sports junkies create stories and narratives about players and teams just like we do about everything else. Over a game, over a season, we try to shoehorn them into story lines we’ve seen time and time again. This team is going great. That team is going down. This team is full lovable underdogs. This team is full jerks.
Consider how the Duke men’s basketball team simultaneously became a national powerhouse and an object of deep, fevered loathing, in no small part because of its consistent success, even though we are taught to revere winners. Consider how basketball fans talk of Cinderella seasons when teams vastly exceed expectations.
The N.C.A.A. is truly amazing. The best thing about the N.C.A.A. tournament is its ability to instantly change our perceptions and narratives. Blue bloods are not as strong as Cinderellas. Schools that spend $18 million to build a basketball Goliath may lose to schools that spend less than a tenth. Top-seeded teams that have won championships lose in the first round against teams you may not have heard of, but will probably never forget. In less than a second, the narratives that have been carefully constructed throughout a season of college basketball can be destroyed.
Yet, even as our carefully crafted narratives are heaved into sea (along with our broken brackets), it is still something we watch. Every year, the N.C.A.A. Every year, the N.C.A.A. brings us back to play again. But why?
Our brains create narratives that can be easily ruined by one guy lighting up during the second half of a national champion game. Supposed to be my beloved Wolverines’ championship triumph? I’m the type of person who Googles movie plots ahead of time to make sure that 1) the dog doesn’t die and 2) nothing too traumatic happens. So why am i in love? Because a tournament that will likely bring down my expectations of Kentucky or cause something traumatic (like calling a dang-timeout when you don’t have any)?
To better understand the N.C.A.A., here are some of the things that make it so fascinating. tournament, I spoke with Jonathan Gottschall, the author of “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” about how we tend to make sense of the world through stories.
The resistance of the N.C.A.A. tournament must have a story and be predictable is part its appeal and draws fans.
“All the most popular forms of storytelling — best sellers, big hits — you kind of know before the story starts how it’s going to end,” said Gottschall. He gave the example of the James Bond films, in which, despite all the action, you’re pretty sure you know what’s going to happen in the end: “The bad guys are not going to triumph.”
In other words, they aren’t called the Harry Potter books because Harry Potter fails. The N.C.A.A. is different. tournament, all of the predetermined narrative arcs are removed, and as Gottschall told me, there is an “intensity of suspense that’s lacking from most other storytelling that we consume.”
The N.C.A.A. tournament doesn’t work the way that so much of the content we absorb every single day does. The teams you hate might win or even the team you’d never heard of until it dunked all over Georgetown. It’s completely unpredictable, even by the very unpredictable metrics set by other sports. And that’s its beauty. The N.C.A.A. The tournament rejects all narratives that we impose upon players and teams.
The N.C.A.A. tournament, it simply doesn’t matter how much you want a team to win or how little credence you give to its opponent. You can forget about other factors such as how wealthy a coach is, how big a school and how many people are willing to travel hundreds of miles to watch the team play in Big Dance. For 40 minutes, once a year, all narratives and story lines you’ve built around your favorite college basketball team are meaningless, until you construct brand-new ones, on the fly — about, say, an Arkansas team that defeats the No. To make it to the Elite Eight, you must be the No. 1 seed.
The N.C.A.A. has a unique place in a world where everything seems certain. The tournament is a joyous rejection of certainty. It will show you your top N.B.A. draft pick and your Sports Illustrated covers and says, “What if you lost anyway?”
And that’s where the fun really begins.
Source: NY Times