Apocalypse Now

When Davidson guard Jason Richards’ last second three-pointer missed the mark, ending his team’s long-shot bid to upset the mighty Kansas Jayhawks, it became official: For the first time in the history of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, all four number one seeds had advanced to the Final Four.

The odds that North Carolina, UCLA, Kansas, and Memphis—the four top-ranked teams in the country—would all make it to the championship in San Antonio were fairly slim. Basketball Prospectus, which uses past performance to generate probabilities of future outcomes, estimated the chance of what they termed the “Doomsday Scenario” at 3.5% (smaller, incidentally, than the probability that a number one seed would be upset in the first round). However, that still made it the single most likely of the 65,536 possible combinations of Final Four teams.

It was also the people’s choice. All four number one’s were heavy fan favorites to win their respective regions according to ESPN’s National Bracket, a compilation of the millions of picks submitted on its website, meaning literally hundreds of thousands of fans were able to cheer along this past weekend as all of their teams punched tickets to San Antonio.

This intersection of populism and accuracy in the 2008 Tournament makes the outcome particularly infuriating to experts. Anyone with the ability to count could have predicted the Final Four. In fact, Kelly Evans ’10 did just that, and picked the higher seed in every single game. She’s currently in third place out of 115 entries in the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective’s pool. (This puts her 24 places ahead of yours truly. Ever the non-conformist, I spiced up my bracket with a two seed, Duke, and a three seed, Louisville. So much for originality).

Every year, regardless of what unfolds, the NCAA Tournament always confounds sophisticated prognosticators. A 64-team single elimination college basketball tournament is inherently unpredictable. March Madness, with its frequent Cinderella teams, is a consistent reminder that life has an inexorable chaotic streak, and that there is no way to perfectly divine the future, regardless of how much knowledge and expertise one brings to bear. While we often look back and presume that outcomes were foreseeable, in many circumstances random chance simply has more influence than reason can account for. Take, for example, Russell Pleasant, who beat out more than 3 million other brackets to win ESPN’s $10,000 prize for the highest score in 2006. When asked how he knew to pick heavy underdog George Mason to reach the Final Four, he explained that he “slightly confused them with George Washington.”

But this year, for the first time ever, things went exactly according to plan. It’s like that time on the SAT’s when you got six B’s in a row. Every now and then, the probabilities align the right way, and produce something unusually ordered. Often, we find the opposite remarkable in sports—we are astounded by the miraculous upset, when David defeats Goliath. This time, though, we can appreciate the opposite: Goliath, beating David, over and over again, in a stunning and rare display of the triumph of rational order.

Daniel E. Herz-Roiphe ’10, a Crimson Associate Editorial Chair, is a social studies concentrator in Adams House.