March means brackets, and brackets mean war.
Do you remember where you were on the opening afternoon of March Madness 2011? I do: Economics 1051 in Waters Auditorium, where the only thing saving the 200 of us were laptops.
About 30 of them, scattered about the seats, were streaming an opening-round game. They were all watching Kansas, begging for the Jayhawks to lose.
When it comes to March Madness, it’s not just the movie scenes we expect to see, like Kansas losing to a team named Virginia Commonwealth, that beg us to watch. It’s the ones we don’t, like 11-seed Virginia Commonwealth making it to that Elite Eight game to begin with, that challenge us to breathe.
For a moment, residence hall rooms across MU join others across America, where sheets of brackets litter desks of laptops streaming the buzzer-beaters, jingles, Bill Raftery growls and Tom Izzo net-cuttings that coin the month of March as the greatest page of the sports calendar.
Such ingrained tradition gives way to new ideas and hyperboles that extrapolate on the March Madness brand. (Look up [“Gus Johnson Soundboard”](http://www.gusjohnsongetsbuckets.com/) for a summation.) One of those has been Maneater Madness, The Maneater’s annual highlight of the tournament.
Whether the tradition following Missouri’s Elite Eight run in 2009 was a coincidence, I can’t answer. But I can guarantee the Maneater Madness team will be there for each step in the current Tigers’ path through the tournament, from the plains of Omaha, Neb., to the festivities of New Orleans if that’s the story this year’s Tigers script for us.
But the Tigers remain a small piece in the 68-team puzzle that is the tournament, and we recognize that putting those pieces together remains the true fun of the next two weeks of bracket bonanza. Not every youthful sage knows that St. Bonaventure Bonnies hail from western New York, and only the elite can appreciate the swagger of Brad Stevens or Shaka Smart until after the magic unfolds.
Maneater Madness asks you to try.