Christian Science Monitor: Troubling March Madness byproduct: a boom in 'bracketology'
The mix of math, basketball stats, and guts is raising concerns among addiction counselors, sociologists, and the NCAA itself.
ATLANTA - It started with a $5 pool as the Midwestern high schooler filled out a bracket of teams he predicted would climb to the Valhalla of college basketball: the Final Four.
His run ended before he graduated from college last May, when he had to pay the mafia $25,000 to lay off his family and himself. What happened? Given the prospect of easy money, his own smarts, and plenty of time to watch sports on TV, he'd become the dorm bookmaker, carrying $100,000 a month in bets, encroaching on established local rackets.
It's an extreme tale, but a cautionary one as the growing mania around "bracketology" – the mix of math, stats, and guts used to bet on which teams make it to the championship round – is raising concern among addiction counselors, sociologists, and the NCAA itself.
At the same time, bracketology has moved out of sports bars and cubicle mazes and into university math labs. There, Pythagorean theorems are leveraged against Joakim Noah's stats and the dynastic influence of Patrick Ewing Jr. on the Georgetown squad to draw math-wary students into problems that matter to them.
"[Bracketology] cuts as deep sociologically as anything I can come up with," says Tim Otteman, a researcher at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, a perch from where he gathered the real-life story about the college bookie who ran afoul of the mob. "It's almost a runaway train that can't be stopped." ...
You're telling me! El Jefe, Portia and her husband got involved in it this spring and he swears he'll never do it again. I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Quotidian Grace | Mar 29, 2007 at 08:23 PM
I do my brackets but I don't bet on this stuff. It really is something to watch.
Posted by: Michael W. Kruse | Mar 29, 2007 at 09:33 PM