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The Picks of the Press, Part 2Why do sportswriters think alike?

By Bryan CurtisPosted Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 4:51 PM ET

Last week, Sports Nut set out to determine how well sportswriters could forecast the NCAA Tournament. We combined the brackets of 15 basketball writers and columnists into one, forming a superbracket that holds their collective wisdom. How have the writers fared so far? Not particularly well. They correctly predicted only 19 of 32 first-round games and nine of the 16 second-round matchups, which is slightly worse than if they had simply picked the higher seed in each game. But the writers still have dogs in the fight, and after tonight and tomorrow's games they could nail seven members of the Elite Eight. (Click here to peruse the writers' bracket and read more about our methodology.)

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What's really intriguing, though, is how often our 15 writers made the same picks. For the tournament's more lopsided first-round games—say, the No. 1 seed versus No. 16—you would expect most of the writers to vote for the heavy favorites. And they did, almost unanimously. But in the other, more evenly matched first-round games, you would expect the writers' opinions to diverge—that is, for some of them to pick one team and some to pick the other. They didn't. Look how they voted in four games in the Midwest Region:

No. 5 Florida (12 votes) vs. No. 12 Creighton (three votes)
No. 6 Texas (14 votes) vs. No. 11 Boston College (one vote)
No. 7 Wake Forest (one vote) vs. No. 10 Pepperdine (14 votes)
No. 8 Stanford (two votes) vs. No. 9 Western Kentucky (13 votes)

The writers weren't just flocking to the favorites—Pepperdine and Western Kentucky were both underdogs. Nor, in hindsight, were they exercising some kind of divine journalistic wisdom. Three of their four picks—Florida, Pepperdine, and Western Kentucky—lost.

In fact, it happened again and again all over the bracket—games that should have divided the writers barely divided them at all:

No. 6 California (three votes) vs. No. 11 Pennsylvania (12 votes)
No. 7 Oklahoma State (one vote) vs. No. 10 Kent State (14 votes)
No. 7 North Carolina State (four votes) vs. No. 10 Michigan State (11 votes)
No. 7 Xavier (five votes) vs. No. 10 Hawaii (10 votes)
No. 8 Notre Dame (11 votes) vs. No. 9 Charlotte (4 votes)

Why would 15 randomly selected writers, from different publications in different parts of country, suddenly come down with a case of groupthink? Well, the most obvious explanation is the information-sharing capabilities of the Internet, which has become an integral tool for sports journalists (and every other journalist). An underdog like, say, Pepperdine is touted in two or three big Web sites or newspapers in the week before the tournament. The information spreads like a fad, and before long every writer has penciled in the same "upset special." But without a similar pre-Web study, such a phenomenon is impossible to prove.

Another explanation is that when sportswriters predict a given game, they rely on their professional advantage: They have seen the teams in question play more than the average fan. But when the NCAAs roll around, the size of the tournament field dulls that advantage. (Assume the average writer, depending on his publication, has seen no more than half of the 64 teams play before the tournament starts.) How good is Montana or Creighton or Holy Cross? Without specific insight, the writer relies on the same kind of apocryphal "bracket wisdom" reserved for lesser mortals. For example: "The Ivy League team always pulls a first-round upset." (This has happened only twice in the last decade, but it's a still a March Madness cliché.) Or "No. 10 always beats No. 7." (It happens only slightly more than half the time.) Thus, 80 percent of our writers pick Pennsylvania, and a big majority picks all four No. 10s.

Sports Nut predicts "The Fray" has an even better explanation for why sportswriters think alike. If you've got a theory, post it here. At the end of the tournament, we'll post the best reader ideas and look at how the sportswriters did.

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Bryan Curtis, a contributing writer, writes the "Middlebrow" column.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

Owen S.Good has a splendid theory involving liberal arts colleges and rejection letters. SalukiDale says groupthink covers college football too, while Ender thinks sports reporting is little more than gossip. Lee Heard had a rare word in favor of sportswriters: "Sometimes a consensus is a consensus because it's right," but most posters were a lot more insulting. We particularly enjoyed the Captain's description of the media room's eating habits, below.

Reader Comments From The Fray:

I'm a sportswriter, and the majority of my picks mirrored those in the article. In games involving reasonably close seed--6-11, 7-10, 8-9--that involve a team from a power conference playing a team from a mid-major conference (Kent State vs. Oklahoma State, California vs. Penn) I usually go with the mid-major. Like most sportswriters, I feel the mid-majors are underrated, while fourth-, fifth- and even sixth-place teams from power conferences are often overrated. We're often wrong--Missouri leaps to mind--but it's just more fun to pick upstart Kent State than bland Oklahoma State. There are exceptions on that list--I picked mid-major Charlotte over major Notre Dame, which went against the sportswriter consensus--but the "mid-major'' theory holds much of the way through there.

--Bret Bloomquist

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

As any coach would point out, the problem with sportswriters is that they know so little about the game. Most importantly, sportswriters don't break down film, and consequently, have a shallow understanding of tendencies, matchups, defenses, etc. What sportswriters are good at are working the conventions of sportswriting to produce newspaper stories and quotes about sports. For better or worse, you don't need much understanding of the game to write about coaching legends, intensity, humility, "spoiled players," "Big Mo," and the like. Spending muc of their time with other sportswriters and Not understanding much of the game, sportswriters tend to think alike.

--Riccaric

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

For a brief period in my life, I worked as a sports reporter and columnist for a small newspaper. Once you have seen the media room for an NBA regular-season game, any respect for sportwriters you may have is instantly incinerated--you've never seen a more disgusting collection of fat, unshaven dullards in grease-stained giveaway golf shirts in your life. These guys make amateur bowlers look like triathletes. Complimentary catering spreads can be quite lavish, and ten minutes before gametime there will not be a single rib or buffalo wing left on the spread, while the piles and piles of fruit and vegetables remained unglanced-at. The rest of the game they spend glued to the internet or ocasionally casting an eye up at the scoreboard. There is simply no way these guys have put in the work to know what they are talking about in the NCAAs. "Herd mentality" may be a more accurate term than you know…

If that theory doesn't work for you, I suspect the "consecutive upset" theory might: the writers seemed to pick teams that had prominent upsets either this season or previous tournaments: Gonzaga, Pepperdine, Valparaiso, USC, Western Kentucky, UPenn. If Weber State had qualified this year, they would have undoubtedly picked them. Richmond was also a fashionable upset pick for a few years after their big upset win over Syracuse. Didn't happen. In truth, it is very rare for a small school to score upsets in consecutive years. Gonzaga is the exception, not the rule.

--Captain Ron Voyager

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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