A March Madness Primer for Non-Fans

When I was in college, I was trying to finish a story about the football team's game from the previous week and asked the sports editor, who was male, if he knew how to spell the name of the person who had been playing cornerback.

Really, I was being lazy and should have checked my notes, but I was in the zone and didn't want to get out of it to check spelling. But in that moment, I learned that being male does not make you an expert about sports. Neither, apparently, does being sports editor at a college newspaper.

"The position is called quarterback," he said. And, in that moment, I knew beyond a show of a doubt that I knew more about football than he did.

I was young and cocky at the time, so I rolled my eyes at him and then explained that I was not talking about the guy who threw the ball, I was talking about the running back who doubled as a free safety and was playing cornerback. That shut him up.

Now, all these years later, I see how to guides for women to learn to enjoy sports or talk the talk with other sports fans and I blanch at the sexist nature of it all. See, even now, I have three friends that I can talk sports with: one guy and two girls. Being male does not automatically mean that you know sports and being female doesn't mean you don't.

The women I know are primarily baseball fans, but they can also talk basketball, especially during March Madness. The guy, well, he's more into football, though I'm guessing he will have a bit of a wager on the Big Dance as well. I think he won his office pool last year.

So, this is my primer for non-fans who don't know sports. Really, it's very simple: READ UP ON IT.

You don't have to memorize position names or a hundred years of stats or even who got traded to whom.

If you have a local team headed to the Big Dance, go to your local newspaper's website and read a few articles from the season. This is not rocket science. With Selection Sunday comes a lot of hype about the NCAA basketball tournament, known as the Big Dance, but a lot of the jargon is simple to understand if you just pay attention.

The tournament features 65 teams which proves that some people are not as good at math as they would have us believe. How on earth do you turn 65 teams into one winner?

Well, again, it's not that hard. The teams that were the 64th and 65th pick to get into the tournament play the day before the tournament starts. Then, the top 64 teams play at four sites across the country.

These sites are labeled in the brackets by region, but don't be fooled. The label has nothing to do with what teams go into that bracket. It only refers to where the first games of the tournament take place.

Next, is the tournament seeding, the big deal of selection Sunday. Teams who aren't sure if they are in the best 64 in the country, cross their fingers to see if they even got into the tournament and others try to find out where they will start in the tournament. Again, this is pretty simple, though no one ever likes to explain it.

Teams are given a ranking of one to sixteen in their bracket and the best four teams in the country are all given number one ranks in different brackets. So, the top four teams in the country get a number one seed. The next best teams in the country get number two seeds and so on.

Then, once everyone is ranked, the tournament starts with number one seeds playing the number 16 seeds. The theory here is that there are so many good teams and basketball can change on any given day, so it's possible for those teams with a 16th seed to upset the best teams in the country. It rarely happens and when it does, they almost always lose in the second round.

When each bracket gets down to four teams, you have the sweet 16. At 2 per bracket, we're looking at the elite 8 and when each bracket has a winner, you have the Final Four. Again, in theory, it should be the four teams that went in with number one seeds. That almost never happens either.

Most office betting pools give you points for each game you choose the right winner in and of course, that gets harder and harder as you get to the Final Four because you pick all the winners before the tournament ever starts.

At this time of year, that's about all you need to know about basketball. Anything else, is just icing on the cake.