March Madness- The Best Time of Year

It’s been four days and all seniors Brian Christian, Matt McGannon, Will Wiggins, Frank Opelka and Joseph Brouillette have done is eat wings and watch basketball on Max Maday’s basement couch.

“If we didn’t have sports to talk about, we probably wouldn’t be friends,” Christian said.

It is the beginning of March and while some people are focused on the rising temperatures and spring break, these boys are only thinking about their March Madness brackets. March Madness is this friend group’s favorite time of the year – it’s like Christmas, Christian said.

They all come together on Selection Sunday, when the bracket of 72 teams is released and the betting and planning begin.

“It’s like Santa is coming the next morning the day before March Madness starts,” Christian said. “You watch basketball all day eating appetizers. It turns you into a kid again.”

And this is a common feeling throughout the group. Wiggins believes the two week span in March is the best time of the year – when they get to lock themselves in someone’s basement for eight-games-straight and “pig out” down there according to Brouillette.

With very few similarities between the five boys, Wiggins is surprised by their friendship. But even though they all play different sports, from soccer to golf, the boys were able to find common ground in their love for college basketball.

“It’s the common interest in sports that brought us all together in the beginning,” Wiggins said.

But when they are together, they don’t just compete with their brackets, in between or during halftime, they pull themselves away from the TV to play a game of pickup or knockout in the front yard. They find it hard to sit and watch people play all day and not want to play a little basketball themselves.

Wiggins remembers injuries ranging in severity from an ankle sprain to stitches in the head all the result of competitive basketball playing. The pushing, shoving and yelling matches were all sustained on Maday’s basketball court outside during halftime of March Madness games.

During these games, Brouillette likes to specifically pick on Christian, by either not guarding or fouling him. He’s reasoning – Christian’s a “hot shot” on the court.

“The boys are so competitive with each other. They are always texting back and forth giving each other grief based on people’s brackets,” Christian’s mom, Kristen Christian, said.

Each friend has different strategies on how to fill out their bracket. McGannon likes to pick the upsets, or teams who are not expected to win, while Maday is always seen choosing every favorite in the field.

But senior John Roney seems to get the most grief from his choices. Because he doesn’t tune into every college basketball halftime talk or follow the twitters of the top college players, Roney picks his teams at random. Wiggins and Opelka love to see how his random picks play out.

“I think [March Madness] is 100 percent chance,” Christian said. “Once you get to the bracket, anything can happen. You could watch every game all year and you still couldn’t get [a perfect bracket]. It’s cool that I can enter a bracket pool watch so many games and then my mom who watches five or six KU games a year will beat me in the bracket pool. It brings a lot of people together who aren’t necessarily super into the sport.”

Even though watching as many games throughout the year as possible won’t guarantee a perfect bracket, the boys try to see as many as they can anyways, just out of pure love for the sport.

“All the upsets and the fact that there are so many games in four days makes [March Madness] really entertaining,” McGannon said.

Even when the “madness” of March is months away, the boys get together to watch any and all basketball games, even if their bracket standings aren’t on their minds.

This spring break, even after getting home from their week-long spring break trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, you will find these seniors still talking basketball. They will be texting about the March Madness bracket challenge in “The Boys” group chat, hanging out in someone’s basement eating wings, or blowing off steam on Max Maday’s court when March comes around.