Just as the players compete on the court and the teams compete in the NCAA bracket, we fans can compete through our brackets in groups. Or as James Corden says after spending the day picking his own bracket and then discovering he's not allowed to win money for it, "People do this for fun? Fill out a bracket? Insane."Īnd it's for competition. A different genre with a different purpose, audience, and context.Īnd it's all for fun. They’re asking if you’ve created your own version of it, with your picks for each game. (It also gives bookies a way to make money and offices a way to bond and avoid work, but that’s another topic.) When someone asks, “Do you have your bracket yet?” they aren’t wondering if you’ve seen the NCAA match-ups or pulled a copy of it out of the newspaper. What’s the purpose of the tournament bracket for fans? It’s different enough that it might even be a different genre from the bracket created by the NCAA.įor basketball fans, the bracket takes on another purpose once it’s published: it gives the fans and their friends a fun game to play, guessing which team will win each game.
#MENS NCAA BRACKETS 2017 TV#
Then come all the secondary users of the bracket-ticket sellers, TV programmers, alumni associations and others who arrange watch parties or have their work lives affected by the tournament. The primary audience already shows up in the purpose-the teams who will play, including players and coaches and their staffs, but also the fans. The primary purpose of the bracket may not be to market games to audiences, but some of those bracketing procedures sure don’t hurt TV ratings or NCAA revenues. Could that be partly because it’s generally more exciting to watch teams play that haven’t played each other before? That’s the great opportunity of the tournament, having great teams play each other who wouldn’t ordinarily meet. Could that be partly to make more exciting match-ups with potential audiences from more parts of the country and wider markets? The procedures specify avoiding rematches of various kinds. But the procedures for creating the bracket specify things like not having teams play each other too soon if they’re in the same conference. Oh of course those aren’t stated purposes and I’m sure the tournament Selection Committee is fair and honest. The bracket creates the games that teams will play, if they keep winning, and the games that we fans will watch, if the NCAA has done a good job of matching up teams we want to watch play.īecause there are other purposes to the bracket-like creating match-ups fans want to watch in order to increase TV ratings and NCAA revenues. places the teams into a bracket that matches who will play whom.seeds the 68 teams that will play in the tournament (ranking them).selects the 36 best teams not automatically qualified through winning their conference or tournament.What’s the purpose of the tournament bracket? Who’s its audience? What else from the context shapes or constrains it? And what does that tell us about this genre and about this game?įor the NCAA and its expert selection committee, the bracket Here’s a little rhetorical analysis from someone who’s relatively expert in rhetoric but not at all expert in tournament brackets. Tournament brackets-a genre created by expertise and some marketing and a genre busted by talent and some luck. Not to mention the games themselves, the play-by-plays, color commentary, interviews, halftime shows, pregame shows, chants, cheers, and booing. I'm leaving out the many, many, many other genres that surround the bracket-the selection shows on TV, stats, RPIs, online discussion groups, betting odds, and even busted bracket brackets. Out of my mourning for my busted bracket-and even more from my regret that the KU Seniors Landon Lucas, Frank Mason, and Tyler Self end their college careers in such a sad way-I thought I’d comment on the whole madness of tournament brackets. It lost its game to Oregon in the Elite Eight, a game KU should have won, according to the stats and the experts. You might have guessed-Saturday KU had its one crappy game. and then that team loses, in spite of the stats and the odds and all the expert analysis.
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