March Madness spreading around campus

Even with the sunshine and accompanying spring weather just starting to appear this month, many students remain indoors glued to ESPN. Yes, it's once again time for the yearly sports phenomenon of March Madness, the contest to determine the nation's best college basketball team.
Of course, along with the actual games and enthusiastic support for rabid college basketball fans, many students - including plenty of such fans here at Furman - also take up the challenge of predicting the entire tournament by creating brackets in which they predict the winners of each region and the overall contest.
While there may be many smaller competitions here on campus - either for bragging rights or even prizes -- two large competitions have been set up for the entire Furman community.
Last year, current sophomore philosophy major Jonathan Borders created a March Madness bracket pool for his hall, but this year he opened the group up to all Furman students. Borders received 15 entries, including four females, one of whom is an Admissions staff member.
For his contest, a five dollar entry fee was required, and both first and second place winners will receive a cash prize, Borders said. While his competition is relatively small now, in the future he hopes that his tournament will continue to grow.
When asked for advice about how students can create a winning bracket, Borders said that watching the games and doing some research online is a great way to start. His personal picks for the Final Four are University of Connecticut, Duke, Gonzaga and Ohio State, though he adds that last year Gonzaga's failure "ruined" his bracket.
Kevin Treu, professor of computer science, has also created a pool, but in this case the brackets can be entered online. This pool, though, has quite a history, beginning 12 years ago on paper and then moving to the Internet nine years ago. The number of contest entrants has also increased, expanding from students and faculty in the CS department to a campus-wide contest which this year has received 112 entries, about half of which are students.
One unique feature of this pool, though, is an "upset scoring system" developed by Treu so that "upset picks" are rewarded to make sure that entrants aren't just selecting the most probable winners - the "safe" route, as Treu labels it.
The prize for this contest is only bragging rights, but there are no entry fees either.
For his Final Four, Treu selected Texas, Pittsburgh, University of Connecticut and Boston College, admitting that this is more of an ideological-based bracket. While Virginia and Pittsburgh are his two favorite teams, he said, "An even more powerful motivation, however, is my hatred for both UNC and Duke. I can never bring myself to pick either one of those teams, no matter how dominant they are."
If one is in doubt when making his bracket, Treu says that you might as well flip a coin to determine the winner. Of course, research is another important tool: watch the games the entire season and seek out the experts' opinions, he advises. Still, he doesn't dismiss the importance of luck in any March Madness pool.
Of course it's easy to see the massive fan base that this sports contest has gathered, but it's still hard to pinpoint exactly what draws fans to these pools in such large numbers. And what makes this event bigger than, say, the Super Bowl, the World Series or the Olympics?
"I think that March Madness is a bigger overall event even than College Bowl games, simply because there are so many games," said Borders. "And the name really describes it all. There are upsets every year, and that's what really makes this so great."
True agreed, "I'd have to say it's the 'anyone can win it' history of the event. All other sports try to sell themselves that way, but you really enter a season with only a handful of teams having a legit chance to win it all.