March Madness and the pleasures of casual fandom

Casual fandom is discouraged in the current online sports climate, which is what makes March Madness so much fun.

March Madness is here again, which means it is time for a nation of sports fans to develop a fleeting but rabid interest in college basketball. It’s an interesting phenomenon, given how little attention is paid to the sport’s regular season. In the blink of an eye college basketball goes from ignored to omnipresent. Everyone makes a bracket, even if a majority of those people are incapable of locating many of the participating schools on a map. For a few weeks every March (and now into April) college basketball reigns supreme, dominating the airwaves and chewing up segment after segment on Sports Center.

It’s not hard to understand why the tournament is so popular, filled as it is with Cinderella stories and miraculous last-second jump shots, but said popularity exists in juxtaposition to the indifference most people have toward college basketball from November through February. Especially interesting is how diehard fans of other sports temporarily flock to a sport they know little about. NFL number-crunching gurus and analytics-inhaling NBA basketbloggers, people who build their identities on knowing more, on being smarter, on memorizing and analyzing every bit of news that travels down the pipeline — these people, when it comes to March Madness, gleefully accept being ignorant or ill-informed. They transition from being experts, from being all-knowing, to the type of casual fandom usually portrayed as unbecoming, maybe even pathetic. Yet they undergo that transition with relish.

To understand how and why this happens, it’s important to take a wider look at how sports fandom exists in the current digital age. Simply put, when it comes to national conversations about sports, the conversations that fill message boards and blogs and Twitter timelines, the current climate is not exactly hospitable to casual fans. Simply floating along, dipping a toe in here and there, changing rooting interests and favorite teams on a whim, are not acceptable actions, at least not if you want to have your opinions listened to or taken seriously. There’s a large push to be as educated as possible when it comes to your favorite sport and team.

That pressure to be an expert, or to at least display some semblance of expertise, is undeniable. Fall short in your knowledge, cut corners with your analysis, and you’re seen as just another dull hot take artist spewing banalities, just another slack-jawed armchair critic equipped with cliches and nothing more. You’re outdated, behind the times, intellectually lazy. Being a casual fan, someone with no interest in becoming the next Bill Barnwell or Zach Lowe, is seen as a sign of incuriosity. There is so much information available, from specific team blogs devoted to daily minutiae to analytics-driven websites, that ignoring it, electing instead to experience sports in a superficial way, is portrayed as an affront to knowledge, to technology.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with pursuing a more nuanced, developed, informed understanding of your favorite sport or team. But that pursuit, when conducted day in and day out, can grow tedious, even exhausting. An incredible amount of mental energy has to be devoted to simply treading water, to keeping abreast of the latest developments and analyses. That hard work can be pleasurable, sure, but it is still hard work, requiring time and effort and focus.

What’s appealing about March Madness, then, is that it’s a major sporting event that doesn’t demand expertise. In fact, a lack of expertise is what’s expected. The rules of fandom change: actions normally derided as being unserious — rooting for teams based on colors or mascots, shameless bandwagon hopping, watching a game with almost no knowledge of its participants — become acceptable during March Madness. The tournament functions as a mental vacation. It’s a time to kick back and simply take in sports without being expected to know every little detail.

Are there people for whom March Madness is a serious endeavor? Undoubtedly. But for many fans March Madness is the only time when engaging with college basketball is anything more than an afterthought. Although the sport certainly has its fair share of diehards and obsessives, on the whole college basketball isn’t a cultural priority. One-and-done superstars, players such as LSU’s Ben Simmons, seep their way into the national conversation, as do highlights and other meme-able, blog-friendly content (the Monmouth bench being this past season’s prime example). But that seems to be the extent of the national interest in pre-March college basketball. Save for a few GIFs and glorious moments of Duke schadenfreude, college basketball exists on the periphery. It’s not a sport that’s forgotten, not entirely, but one that’s framed as being of secondary or even tertiary importance, unable to capture much, if any, attention away from the conversational black hole cluster of the NFL, NBA and college football.

With so little attention paid to college basketball for most of the year, it’s understandable why so much March Madness content assumes a level of ignorance. Consider all the articles about sleeper picks, about unknown players poised to become media darlings, about unfamiliar schools with strange names. These articles are popular because it is assumed, even expected, that a vast majority of sports fans, despite loving March Madness, aren’t well acquainted with the sport they’re about to spend the next month following. Uninformed viewers are the rule, not the exception.

And that’s totally fine! More than fine, actually! It’s healthy for hardcore sports fans — the sorts of people who spend the entire calendar year pouring over salary caps and spreadsheets and charts, who are tireless in their pursuit of smart takes to parrot — to have a month where they can revert back to following sports in a casual, lighthearted way. It’s relaxing, almost liberating. It’s similar to when you finally read a book outside of a scholastic setting and are reminded of how enjoyable reading can be when you don’t have to transform your thoughts into a term paper. It’s a wonderful feeling.

So when you’re watching the tournament this weekend, think about how good it feels to watch a sport without having to obsess over it, without being expected to know all the little nuances of what’s happening on the court, without having to formulate the smartest takes. Think about how not knowing much about college basketball doesn’t hinder the ability to experience the highs and lows of the tournament, not one iota. Enjoy the vacation from the usual pressures of sports fandom. Be a fair-weather fan, a bandwagoner. Embrace how freeing it feels to be a casual fan again, if only for a few weeks.