It’s that time of year, a time widely anticipated for the change it brings, for the community that coalesces around it, for the order it instills, and even for the impact, innovation and imitation it sparks across multiple industries beyond sports.
It’s not spring, which officially arrives March 19, or even fishing season in Pennsylvania, which begins April 6.
No, this time stretches for weeks, with most of the attention focused on it beginning March 17 and continuing to April 9. Still, its impact has been valued for decades in a less prominent public roles — and then truly perfected, magnificently marketed and regularly referenced since the early 1990s.
Welcome to “bracket season.”
You know the brackets, most famously the visual approach to track 68-team field for the NCAA Tournament. The tournament was just eight teams when it began in 1939, doubled to 16 teams in 1951 and reached 64 teams in 1985.
Not long after that, “the brackets” earned their own, unrivaled level of influence in pop culture.
Those perfect little lines, offering order and structure as teams march toward a basketball national championship, were embraced by seemingly everyone. From those in the know, experts like ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, to those who only worry about college basketball season once the office pool opens, Joe and Jane Lunchbucket, people were interested.
Millions of people fill out brackets every year. In an unpredictable world, there’s a bit of stability with the brackets. Folks might make their picks according to analytics, seeds, uniform colors or whatever else, but people follow the process. It’s easy and simple, thanks to the brackets.
And the brackets themselves were design perfection – the just-right size to fit on a horizontal piece of 8.5×11 paper for the office pool, or to squeeze onto the bottom half of a broadsheet newspaper page (back when that was a thing). Still, that perfection has been enhanced by the creativity of online designers who’ve made the layout of brackets easy to use and functional for the now-more-common digital approach to selecting teams.
Even when the men’s tournament grew to 68 teams in 2011 (because TV partners needed a bit more content to bump up revenue), the brackets maintained their power. Sure, their look changed a bit, but they retained their power.
You might scroll through your screen to pick teams, but it’s still all about the bracket.
Most impactful, the bracket has become ubiquitous beyond basketball. For example, wrestling (and thousands of youth, high school and college wrestlers would confirm this) adores the brackets. Years and years of wrestlers have stood atop podiums after a tournament with a poster-sized bracket of success tracking their accomplishments in hand and a first-place medal around their necks. Many of those posters probably hung in bedrooms and game rooms for years and do so to this day.
Men’s college basketball magnified the brackets’ impact, though, and those brackets have been adopted by every other major college sport as well as pro sports. While the NFL, NHL and MLB do not need visuals to explain their playoff process, on-screen graphics for postseason play — little brackets — have popped more often in the past couple of decades than ever before. References to “the tournament” for those pro playoffs have increased as well.
That’s because the brackets matter, and people embrace them.
The brackets show up in other places, too. They influence court design for the basketball tournaments that start next week. Honest, just watch for hints of them in the end zones and out-of-bounds areas.
Plus, they’re often a part of on-screen graphics for broadcasts of games. Their clean look offers a strong supporting structure for bottom thirds as well as timely statistics.
The brackets are everywhere. You can safely bet some advertiser, or advertisers, will embrace brackets of some manner during pitches that’ll be delivered to viewers in the next few weeks. That’s power before, during and after the tournament, on the floor and off, in competitions contested on hardwood or almost any other sporting competition.
The brackets have become the ultimate influencer — functional and simple but extremely powerful at the same time — with millions of followers. They chart success and failure, chronicle underdog stories and powerhouse performances.
They’re perfect in so many ways, and this is their season. Enjoy.
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