NCAA March Madness, New York Mayor Mamdani’s city bracket

When he became president in 2009, Barack Obama began making public his bracket, that is, the predictions for every outcome of the men’s and women’s NCAA tournament. Let’s talk about college basketball and March Madness: the final phase of the university championship, one of the most followed sporting events of the year. The bracket is a tradition that mixes study, reasoning, passion and luck: every year millions of people (26.6 million on the ESPN website alone this year) try to fill in the perfect one, trying to predict the race of the Cinderella teams, or which of the favorites will not disappoint. Nobody has ever succeeded. The odds? One in 9.2 quintillion.

Mayor’s Municipal Madness

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Alternative, non-sports brackets are plentiful on the web: with direct elimination by voting you can elect anything, from the best book to the most successful meme. The newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, used March Madness to launch his version: the “Mayor’s Municipal Madness”. In a video published on social media, shot on a city pitch with the broken iron (for those who experience playgrounds all over the world as a plague every day), Mamdani fixes it together with Natasha Cloud, Wnba champion with the New York Liberty. And here’s the idea: to turn urban repairs into a bracket. Citizens will be able to vote on concrete interventions, from signs to be repainted to broken benches, to non-functioning fountains, in a direct elimination challenge. An eye for sport: the bottom of a basketball court, putting the red clay back into a tennis court and fixing the screen of another, repainting a handball wall. All interventions will still be carried out, but the winning one will be carried out by the mayor himself on the hundredth day of his mandate. A way to also give visibility to the daily work of maintenance teams.

elite eight, no brackets left

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Returning to the original March Madness, between tonight and tomorrow night the Elite Eight, the quarterfinals, will be played: Duke-UConn, Arizona-Purdue, Iowa-Illinois and Michigan-Tennessee. This year too, no scoreboard remained intact, neither in the men’s nor in the women’s tournament. Until yesterday, the last perfect bracket belonged to a 14-year-old boy from Pittsburgh, who had not missed a prediction for the women’s Sweet 16. And it was pure luck, he admitted. The NCAA website recalls that the longest verifiable streak of successful victories was 49, in 2019. In 2022, however, all the brackets had already been compromised in the first round, before the end of the second day of matches. This year, after Dylan Darling’s late basket that gave fifth-seeded St. John’s the victory against Kansas, there was only one perfect bracket left on ESPN. In 2023 the coup de grace was the defeat of the number 1 seed Purdue against the 16th Fairleigh Dickinson, only the second time in the history of the men’s tournament in which a 16th beat a 1st.