The second-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes entered the second round of the women’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournament heavily favored to win over the Creighton Bluejays. Iowa had the best player on the court: the point guard Caitlin Clark, who led the country in points and assists. Iowa had the home-court advantage, with nearly 15,000 fans in attendance expecting to see an Iowa victory that would take the Hawkeyes to the Sweet 16.
Instead, they saw upstart Creighton, a team ranked 32nd in the country (Iowa was ranked 13th) beat the Hawkeyes. Clark missed every shot she took in the second half, and Creighton — led by Lauren Jensen, who transferred from Iowa to Creighton — won the game.
Iowa had the winning narrative — a team that’s been great all year, a team that won the Big Ten Tournament merely two weeks before, a team that probably would beat Creighton if given another chance. But it won’t have that chance.
Sports junkies tend to create narratives and story lines about teams and players, just as we do about most things. Over a game, over a season, we try to shoehorn them into story lines we’ve seen time and time again. This team is going to be great. That team is going to struggle. This team is full of lovable underdogs. That team is full of jerks.
Consider how the Duke men’s basketball team simultaneously became a national powerhouse and an object of deep, fevered loathing, in no small part because of its consistent success, even though we are taught to revere winners. Think about how basketball fans talk about Cinderella seasons for teams that vastly outplay expectations.
But the truly great thing about the N.C.A.A. tournament is that it can, in an instant, upend our narratives and preconceptions. Cinderellas can beat blue bloods. Schools that spent $18 million on constructing a basketball Goliath can come up short against schools that spent not even a tenth of that. Top-seeded teams with championship bona fides lose in the first round to teams you may have never heard of but will likely never forget. The narratives carefully constructed during an entire season of college basketball can be shattered in under a second.
And yet even as our carefully constructed narratives get heaved into the sea (alongside our broken brackets), we keep watching. Every year the N.C.A.A. tournament draws us in and then spits us back out, and every year we come back for more. But why?
Why do our brains create narratives that can so easily be ruined by, say, one guy shooting lights out during the second half of a national championship game and spoil what was supposed to be my beloved Wolverines’ championship triumph? I’m the type of person who Googles movie plots ahead of time to make sure that 1) the dog doesn’t die and 2) nothing too traumatic happens. So why am I in love with a tournament that will likely shatter my notion that Kentucky will be good this year or, worse, bring about something traumatic, like calling a dang timeout when you have none left?
To better understand what is so captivating about the N.C.A.A. tournament, I spoke with Jonathan Gottschall, the author of “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” about how we tend to make sense of the world through stories.
The resistance the N.C.A.A. tournament has to pat narrative, and predictability, is part of its appeal, and attracts fans.
“All the most popular forms of storytelling — best sellers, big hits — you kind of know before the story starts how it’s going to end,” said Gottschall. He gave the example of the James Bond films, in which, despite all the action, you’re pretty sure you know what’s going to happen in the end: “The bad guys are not going to triumph.”
In other words, they aren’t called the Harry Potter books because Harry Potter fails. But in the N.C.A.A. tournament, all of the predetermined narrative arcs are removed, and as Gottschall told me, there is an “intensity of suspense that’s lacking from most other storytelling that we consume.”
The N.C.A.A. tournament doesn’t work the way that so much of the content we absorb every single day does. The teams you hate might win or even the team you’d never heard of until it dunked all over Georgetown. It’s completely unpredictable, even by the very unpredictable metrics set by other sports. And that’s its beauty. The N.C.A.A. tournament completely rejects the narratives we impose on teams and players.
In the N.C.A.A. tournament, it simply doesn’t matter how much you want a team to win or how little credence you give to its opponent. And you can forget about other factors like how much money the coach makes and how big a school is and how many fans are willing to trek hundreds of miles to see the team play in the Big Dance. For 40 minutes, once a year, all narratives and story lines you’ve built around your favorite college basketball team are meaningless, until you construct brand-new ones, on the fly — about, say, an Arkansas team that defeats the No. 1 seed to make it to the Elite Eight.
In a world where so much seems certain, the N.C.A.A. tournament is a delightful rejection of certainty. It sees your top N.B.A. draft pick and your Sports Illustrated covers and says, “What if you lost anyway?”
And that’s where the fun really begins.
