Allergies and taxes aside, what’s not to love about spring? The beginning of warmer weather, the start of baseball season and, of course, the NCAA Basketball Tournament — popularly known as March Madness.
I, myself, have filled out tournament brackets perhaps six times over the years. It’s hard not to get sucked into the excitement since it’s all anyone seems to talk about for about two weeks. At the same time, it feels like a lot of work, particularly given the relatively short window available to make one’s picks. There’s only a few days from the point that teams and seeds are known to when entries must be submitted.
Unlike buying a Super Bowl box, which requires little time and no skill, participating in one of the tens of thousands of NCAA basketball pools requires you to make around 63 different decisions. Also, it would seem that at least some basic knowledge of who’s good and who’s not would be a prerequisite for participating since picking “upsets” is essentially a necessity to have a shot at winning. According to Smithsonian, there are over 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes, and the “most likely” outcome can never be relied upon. For instance, only one time in history (2008) have the top four seeds all made it to the final four.
So with all this unpredictability and pressure to make quick decisions, what is this national obsession with March Madness? Around 60 million Americans fill out a bracket each year, and an estimated $1 billion goes into unlicensed off-book betting. To find out more about what we can expect this year, VeraQuest surveyed 1500 respondents between March 9 and March 11, 2016 to see how many people plan to create a bracket and how much they expect to spend. Here is what we discovered:
- More than one-quarter (27%) of all Americans ages 18 and older believe they will fill out at least one bracket for this year’s tournament, and they plan on spending just over $30 apiece.
- March Madness is definitely a younger person’s event — participation rates for those under 40 (36%) are twice that of those ages 50 and up (17%)
- While March Madness is dominated by men, over a third (36%) of participants will be women.
- Men will spend slightly more than women — $32 versus $28 respectively.
- Participation tends to skew toward those with higher incomes as well as those with more education.
Let us know if you have been bitten by the March Madness bug. Have you or will you pick a bracket or two this year? If so, how much will you spend?
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