The pinnacle of college sports in the United States, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament — a single-elimination contest taking place each spring, istering feverish obsession on par with its moniker March Madness — is ready for the 2019 Final Four showdown at the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, MN.
Semis are scheduled for April 6 and the National Championship game is set for April 8. All games will be played in front of 66,860 spectators. Yes, the sell-out in guaranteed.
Final Four is to be encomed by a vast number of cameras providing for the national television coverage referred to as Virtual Madness on-air due to the replay-and-analysis system that stitches together multiple camera angles and swooping views of a play, allowing for insanely descriptive diagramming and breakdowns.
Three frenzy weeks …
…of NCAA basketball postseason leading to Final Four are traditionally reserved for astonishing feats of human character, timeless team performances, players that will shape the NBA or continue with their post-college lives, coaching legends, moments that reverberate for years in hearts and minds of viewers regardless of team affinities. They are to remain immortalized in sports chronicles and annals.
This year, though — everything is different.
Never before in the tournament history were American fans able to place legal sports bets anywhere except in Nevada.
Courtesy of the Supreme Court, for the first time sportsbooks in Rhode Island, and West Virginia accepts the United States bettors in a regulated manner.
People’s response came in the form of an unleashed sports betting behemoth that just as well might be nicknamed…
Wagering Madness
According to the American Gaming Association sports betting estimate on NCAA, created by a survey conducted on a national sample of 11,002 grown-ups…
…47 million American will collectively wager $8.5 billion on March Madness in 2019.
That’s close to 1-in-5 adults in the country.
Of those, 40 million people will wager $4.6 billion on the 149 million brackets. Some 18 million Americans will place $3.9 billion in bets at a sportsbook, online, with a bookie, or with a friend, while 4.1 million of them plan to make a bet at a casino sportsbook or by using the legal app.
Of all sports bettors involved, only 5% (2.4 million) will bet illegally with a bookie; an additional 5.2 million (11%) will bet online at an illegal offshore site.
Bill Miller, AGA’s president and CEO concludes:
“During this year tournament — the first in post-PASPA America — sports fans are expected to bet 40% more than they did on this year’s Super Bowl.”
It is officially estimated that $6 billion in bets has been placed at Super Bowl LIII.
The overall number of combinations to bet at is 147.57 quintillion. That’s 147.57 million-trillion — or 147.57 followed by 18 zeros — possibilities for winners in a 68-team bracket.
One surely must be mad enough to go for it all? Not at all.
Back in 2014, Quicken Loans teamed up with Yahoo, backed up by Warren Buffett, and decided to award $1 billion to “any qualified entrant who plays by the rules and correctly predicts the winners of every game” in NCAA postseason.
The contest with such infinitesimal odds was open to any citizen of the U.S. older than 21, allowing for one submission per household. The prize was to be paid by Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in 40 annual installments of $25 million each (or lump-sum $500 million payment).
No one was able to win. No one even made it past the first round.
But people tried. And, they wanted to try again.
Due to almost absurd legal entanglement between organizers about who came up with the idea first, Buffet was the only one to recreate the contest two years later.
This time, it was limited to employees of Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries— 375,000 people in all. Buffet also made it easier.
If one successfully predicts teams to make it to the Sweet 16, it will get $1 million per year for life. The consolation sports betting prize of $100,000 is established for the longest surviving bracket.
One in a Million
To put odds of this contest into perspective, out of 18.8 million brackets filled on ESPN in 2017, only 18 got to the Sweet 16.
No one won Buffet’s major prize since its inception. The race is still on.
However…
Two people did split $100,000 prize in 2016 for having correctly predicted the first fifteen games of the tournament.
In 2017, a West Virginia steelworker came closest ever to win in Buffet’s challenge — he properly predicted 31 out of the first 32 games. He got $100,000.
The most interesting detail about our blue-collar betting hero — we don’t know what game cost him the ultimate prize. Was it the first one played on those two days of second NCAA round? Maybe another one bit later?
What if it was the last game played? Just visualize that scenario for a moment.
It’s Sunday evening, March 19. The game starts at 9:30 ET. You’re on your couch with your wife and three kids, all boys. Snacks, beer, lemonade, prolly some homemade cooking too — it’s all set. You know your bracket, you’re 31/32, and you just need one more win.
At this moment, Patrizio Sr. from Silver Linings Playbook (yes, Robert De Niro) is taking notes on how you OCD good-luck juju charms that include everything and anything human senses can perceive.
On second thought, maybe the kids are in bed!
The game happens to be UCLA vs. Cincinnati in South Regional, the one that Bruins won 79-67. It was a close contest. Fifteen minutes till the end game was tied.
The rhetorical question is — what’s worst, to watch your jackpot slowly slips from your hands or to have it taken from you in the last second?
In our gambling lexicon, we call that volatility.
In a basketball language, they call it crazy skills and stone cold execution.
How else to describe Christian Laettner’s buzzer-beater after a 70-feet from Grant Hill in the East Regional finals pitting Duke and Kentucky in 1992, with 2.1 seconds remaining in overtime? Laettner releases the ball with 0.4 seconds left and the rest is history. Duke will go on to win the National Championship Game and Laettner will become the only collegian player selected for the U.S. Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Or, how to define Kris Jenkins’ three-point release with 0.8 seconds left in the game that won 2016 Championship for Villanova against North Carolina? Yes, the one that sent Charles Barkley through the roof of Turner set.
Difficult & Impossible: Myths Ingredients
Is it possible to forget The Cardiac Pack team of North Carolina State Wolfpack in 1983 Championship Game against star-studded Houston Cougars led by Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon?
Lorenzo Charles slams home Dereck Whittenburg’s 30-foot airball, breaks the tie with two seconds left to play and Wolfpack wins. Next, you know Jim Valvano is sprinting around the floor looking for someone to hug. (Editor’s note: these guys won three of their four postseason games by one or two points and trailed with a minute to play in six matches — hence the ‘cardiac pack’ nick.)
Not that the distance between the ball and the basket make for any inhibitions when it comes to NCAA Tournaments and last second deliriums.
Paul Jasperson and his half-court buzzer-beater in a Round of 64 at 2016 Championships? Northern Iowa had 2.7 seconds left in the game to break a tie against Texas; instead of going for some Hill-Laettner move, Jasperson opted for a cold-blooded 47-feet shot. Surreal.
(To retroflect on the rhetorical question — don’t know about you, but perhaps it’s much healthier for the cardiovascular system to lose million/year for life with twenty minutes remaining in the game.)
Bottom skills line? NCAA players and their games are what the saying is all about:
“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.”
That also explains the notorious struggle of predicting the final results. Then again, it also provides a fitting context about sports betting frenzy…
How can you not bet on this stuff?
The answers are shaping up since 1939, when Harold Olsen, head coach of Ohio State Buckeyes, came up with an idea to create the national postseason playoffs. The first event took place at Northwestern University in Illinois, hosting eight teams. Organizers gave tickets away just to lure fans in the stands; they lost $2,600 in that year, close to $47,000 today.
But the pencils of American sports bettors begun to fill with basketball wagering ink.
In time, NCAA will have written new words of the national vocabulary like the Selection Sunday, Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, Atlantic Ten, Big Twelve, automatic bid, and many others — openly, publicly, in the venues that got bigger and brighter by each incarnation.
New Wagering Bracket
It will take much more time, though, for sports betting to be able to follow suit. Not before a number of points shave scandals and illegal gambling operations shook the foundations of college basketball to the core.
Salvatore Solazzo and City College of New York in 1951, Boston College in 1978-79, Tulane University in 1985, Ed Martin scandal at the University of Michigan in 1996. Each one was severe with equally draconian federal reaction.
Those bubbles on the surface were, de facto, only occasional testimonies about betting desire of the nation deeply devoted towards competitive sports.
Left with only Nevada as the legal sports betting heaven at the time, where casinos established in-house sportsbook, illegal gambling operations skyrocketed to the official volume of hundreds of billions dollars in today’s money. No federal law was ever able to solve this riddle completely.
Until May 2018, when six out of nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court decided that open and legalized sports betting at the public sportsbook, bigger and brighter by each incarnation, is much more viable solution.
To this day, an additional twenty-three States followed suit with active bills to legalize sports betting.
The countrywide response?
According to H2 Gambling Capital, in 2017, the overall national handle on basketball was $1.48 billion; in 2018, it rose to $2.05 billion.
In the first 90 days of 2019, the overall national handle on basketball is $0.9 billion, which makes for annual projections close to $3.6 billion.
Meaningful Madness Triplets
Now, madness usually describes “a spectrum of individual and group behaviors that are characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns”.
So, how to define the seminal moment of legalized wagering when March Madness meets unleashed sports betting proclivity?
Auburn Tigers and the Virginia Cavaliers, Texas Red Raiders and the Michigan State Spartans are lined up to provide for their share of the answer to this question. Auburn and Texas contribute with another milestone: it is the first time ever for two participants to have their debut at Final Four.
The seventh largest sports venue nationwide and the Land of 10,000 Lakes are ready to host spectators anxious to release their emotions or frustrations, depending on, and contribute with their reply to our pondering. Above all, they are to have outstanding fun.
The countrywide frenzy among 25 million television viewers, so huge that rights are equally split between two networks each year — it’s CBS’s turn to deliver Virtual Madness this April — is expected to be additionally lit up with sports betting wagers.
According to the H2 Gambling Capital, Betting Madness is in the vicinity of $12.1 billion. Noticed the difference between H2 and AGA estimations? That’s how much we still cannot fathom the volume of the behemoth.
Each one of triplets is to form a segment of this historical moment. No one can tell what they will deliver.
Competitive tensions are rising….
Spectators’ hopes are getting higher and higher. Adrenalin levels of TV guys will soon get off the charts. When the games begin, sports bettors’ pulses are to start throbbing on par with a V8 engine.
We are ready, too. We’re good to go and celebrate the moment in which sports and people transpire way beyond each other, creating stuff that legends are made of.
Particularly this year — the first of the firsts — when legalized and well-regulated sports betting in the United States meet NCAA postseason in a meaningful manner, paving the way for the new era.
