It's a measure of success of the NCAA men's basketball tournament that I don't need to explain what a bracket is. For money or for glory, millions of Americans have filled out a diagram of the single-elimination tournament with their predictions of game winners and the eventual champion. Beat your friends! Win big bucks! And now the nation is experiencing a annual dip in productivity as workers take time from their jobs to check scores and see how their brackets are doing. To some extent, the excitement has spilled over in the NCAA women's hoops tournament as well as the men's and women's NIT basketball tournaments, where you can also fill out a bracket.
I'm jealous, of course.
Track and field also has single elimination. That's what heats are. If you don't make the cut in the quarter-finals, you don't advance to the semi-finals. Losers in the semis don't get to run in the final. There isn't, though, the kind of drama you get with the head-to-head competition in a basketball tournament. There's enough drama on the track as it is, but people have to be at the track to see it. Would a track "bracket" enlist more fans?
On the chance that it will, I propose Sprint Week.
The Sprint Week competition would invite the 64 best sprinters in the world to compete in a single-elimination tournament of one-on-one match races over 100 meters. It doesn't really matter how you pick the 64 racers as long as you get, say, the ten best in the world in the field. In fact, if a few deserving sprinters get left out while some less deserving sprinters are invited, so much the better. After all, sports journalists need something to write about and sports fans need injustices that they can vent about over a pitcher of beer. For the same reason, the seeding of the tournament doesn't need to be perfect either. Make the selection and seeding processes complicated and secret; encourage conspiracy theories of favoritism and corruption.
The first round would be on Monday, 32 100-meter races of one sprinter versus another. Ideally, these would be at 32 different venues, but this is going to be televised, so you might want to limit it to, say, eight stadiums hosting four races each. Each venue would pay its expenses through ticket sales and concessions and merchandising, which might not be an easy sell in the early years of the tournament, or at least not in the opening rounds. In the first round, each sprinter would receive expenses and $5,000, part of the production costs of the two-hour broadcast of the event. 32 losers would go home after the first round of sprints, 32 winners would travel to a new location for their second round races on Tuesday. My bracket already looks sad.
For round two, let's stick with four races per venue, so four stadiums need to be lined up for the 16 second-round races. Each of the 32 sprinters in round two is paid $10,000, so the athletes' payroll is the same as for round one. There are only sixteen races in round two, so it's possible that you might want to go with a shorter broadcast. Alternatively, you could go with the Dancing With the Stars model, and pad out the two hours with replays from round one, interviews, and talking heads babbling endlessly about what may happen in each race. Hey, it works for football. By now, only two runners in my bracket are still in the competition.
Wednesday is round three. 16 more sprinters have gone home, and eight races are scheduled for the 16 survivors, who receive $20,000 each. Two new venues host four races each. There's a lot more buzz now, so ticket sales will pick up and television viewership will increase. Live bloggers will try to get in on the action, but how much can you write during a ten-second race? Eight losers go home, eight victors advance to round four. I've shredded my bracket.
There are only four races in round four, so only one venue is needed on Thursday. The eight runners each pick up a $40,000 check for this race; we're starting to get into golf tournament kind of money. After the four races, four winners advance, and the other four runners go home.
Round five is Final Four Friday! We'll keep the same venue for the Friday night and Saturday night races; that will make the championship that much more attractive to bid for. This one needs to be in a media center, New York or Los Angeles. I don't care that USATF has their offices in Indianapolis; they don't publish any newpapers or own any networks. Only two races on Friday, but the two winners advance to the championship. I think that I'd really insist on cutting this broadcast to an hour, unless you want to see a lot of interviews where sprinters talk about how exhausting it is to run a 100-meter race every evening for five days. Why, if they kept that up for two weeks, they'd have run almost a whole mile! The payout for Friday is $80,000 per runner. The losers go home having collected a total of $155,000 each.
Sprint Saturday! One race for the title. Each runner gets paid $160,000, but the winner also collects some sort of ridiculously large purse--maybe $685,000 to bring his earnings up to an even million. By now there's lots of stories and slow-motion footage to fill up the broadcast with. The runners walk to the starting blocks amid dancing lights and music. The gun goes off, and ten seconds later there's a new champion. Fireworks erupt. The talking heads babble incoherently. Fans curse at their bracket choices.
I really hope that the Sprint Week tournament takes off, because the next logical step is Miler Month. I know that I can fill out a killer bracket for that one.
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