Jonah Gross, one of the many students at Parker infatuated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s Basketball Tournament, can be found sitting in the Alcove with a computer open during H breaks and U-Lunch. On one tab, a March Madness game is live streamed, and on the next tab, one of the more popular topics of conversation in late March: the bracket.

March Madness, a term originally used for the Illinois statewide high school basketball tournament dating back to 1908 and later coined by the NCAA as the official closing tournament of the season, is a tournament of 64 teams to determine the college basketball champion.
There are six rounds in the tournament. In each round, the number of teams reduces in half until only two teams remain for the championship match. People around the world can fill out a bracket with who they believe will make it to each round and advance to further rounds, until they’ve picked their winner.

Gross compares the three weeks of the tournament to the entire season of fantasy football. In fantasy football, each person drafts a team filled with National Football League (NFL) players and uses that team to compete against others’ teams. In the bracket challenge for March Madness, each person has their own individual bracket based on who they think will win each matchup.
Jonah compares the thrill of having your own fantasy football team to a bracket.“I think it’s a similar case to fantasy football—it’s a mini season. After every game ‘oh did you see this? Did you see this play?’,” Gross said on talking about his conversations with friends. “I’m in brackets with the whole high school and also a small group of my friends. It’s fun and it brings a lot of people together.”

This year, senior Matt Metzler found that no one had stepped up to create an all-Upper School bracket pool, so he sent an email to all Upper School students with a link to join a bracket league he made for an entry fee of $5. The winner of the pool gets $205, the runner up gets $15, and the third place finisher gets their $5 back. “I love March Madness. It provides pretty much an all-day excitement of the best sport in the world: college basketball,” Metzler said. “It’s non-stop play and every team has a shot to be in that final spot.”

Although that bracket competition consists of strictly Parker Upper School students, filling out brackets is not something unique to students. Upper School math teacher Ethan Levine has a bracket pool of five, consisting of his family and his wife, the newest member. “The first weekend of March Madness is the biggest weekend on my sporting calendar,” Levine said. “48 games in four days… It’s a good time.”

For Levine, he tries his best to watch as many games as he can in the time he has after work. On the first weekend, there are games starting at 11:15 a.m., and 15 more games follow that until the last one, typically around 10 p.m. “Now that the four different stations show different games, you can be strategic about setting up one laptop, one TV, and get the whole experience,” Levine said. “It’s a unique event in that I like how much chaos it brings. College basketball is a great game because of all the upsets that can happen at any time.”

The NCAA basketball season is between 28-31 games per team, spanning all the way from November to April. It is difficult to watch every game of the season as intensely as a game in March Madness, as Gross notes, and he is not one of the people that do that. “Generally in the beginning of the NCAA Basketball season I’m not really watching the games,” Gross said, “but as we’re going into the conference tournament weekends, I’m gonna be watching those games, maybe listening to some podcasts, and getting ready to watch some basketball.”

Some, like Gross, are very invested in their bracket and want the outcomes of the games to match their predictions as closely as possible. Levine on the other hand just wants the chaos. “Unless I have any explicit loyalty to the favorite––used to live there, know someone who went there––that kind of thing,” Levine said, “I root for underdogs.”