March Madness is upon us, and it is time to fill out your bracket. After I completed my first go, I realized that I had all #1 seeds in the final four. In the history of the tournament, this has happened once (2008). So, I thought why not pick a couple of Cinderella's to upset them early on? I always love rooting for the underdogs in the tournament because it makes it interesting, but when I think about it, people should want to root for a good, winning team. So why pick the underdog?
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| Recent Cinderella VCU celebrating an upset |
Researchers have found plenty of support for what seems like an obvious notion: In sports, we're drawn to a winner. Other factors (like where you live and who your friends are) can influence your choice of a favorite team. Team success is kind of like the icing on the cake at that point
Which brings us to that peculiar situation, so common in college basketball, where too much icing ruins the cake. In 1991, a pair of researchers at Bowling Green State University, Jimmy Frazier and Eldon Snyder, published a paper called "The Underdog Concept in Sports". They posed a simple hypothetical scenario to more than 100 college students: Two teams, A and B, were meeting in a best-of-seven playoff series for some unidentified sport, and Team A was "highly favored" to win. Which team would the students root for?
Eighty-one percent chose the underdog.
Then the students were asked to imagine that Team B had somehow managed to win the first three games of the series. Would the subjects root for the sweep or switch allegiance to the favorite? Half of those who first picked the underdog now said they'd support Team A. It was the same, ridiculous approach I am taking this year, rooting for #15 Detroit to upset #2 Kansas. Let's go Titans!
In sports, when it's about teams I don't care about, I always pick the underdog for two reasons: it's fun to see good teams lose, and it will put my favorite team or a team I care about in a better position. I agree that for picking favorite teams people mainly choose very successful teams because you want to see them do well. For example, mine is Michigan (at least they used to be sort of good at football). Who would want be a fan of Mississippi Valley State? But for other games, I just want to see good teams lose partly because they are other people's favorite teams, and I imagine this is the thought process for most people.
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