Here is a text sent from Zara:
[After Day 1 of the tournament and the (3) Kentucky loss to (14) Oakland] Thursday, March 21, 10:09 PM ET: “my bracket got messed up”
Boy did that age phenomenally.
March Madness has become one of the greatest sports tournaments in the world. Why? It’s because of the unpredictability. For 98% of the season, not a single person could be talking about an Oakland or an N.C. State, but even they have a chance to capture the hearts of millions and make a run in the tournament.
Creating brackets is no doubt what puts the tournament over the top and changes it from just another sports event into an interactive tournament. It gives you another thing to talk about with friends and family, as well as that coworker who gets once a once-a-year conversation. It brings people together.
This year, ESPN recorded 22.7 million brackets made. If you’ve been following along with our bracket challenge, you know that we have one bracket that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. The bracket titled ‘zara’, owned by Zara Malik, a 14-year-old freshman from LaGuardia High School in New York City, has a story that captures March Madness beautifully.
The night before the games kicked off, Zara got a call from her brother who told her she had to make a bracket. Having made one in years past she was excited to make one. She asked “Who do I pick here?” to which she got “I don’t know it’s your bracket” in return.
She was now all in and choosing winners between schools she had never even heard of.
On TV we see brackets made by college basketball analysts and sports broadcasters whose lives revolve around watching college basketball. On paper, you would imagine that they can crush the competition and make the best brackets in the world, luckily for us, there was no paper involved at all, and Zara made her bracket online.
She made her bracket the same way everybody else did, “It was a feel thing” she said. What happened after that however was very different from everybody else. As the second-round matchups ended one by one last weekend, Zara’s bracket started to climb and climb. Arizona, Gonzaga, UNC, and Iowa St. And then NC State, Tennessee, Illinois, and Creighton (in 2OT!). 8 up, 8 down. She had gone 8 for 8 and had risen into the 99.9%.
Sunday kicked off and it got even crazier. Marquette, Purdue, Duke, and CLEMSON! And then Alabama, UConn, Houston, and San Diego St.. 16 up, 16 down. Zara accomplished what Warren Buffet has said to his employees is worth getting $1 million a year for the rest of their lives. Maybe Mr. Buffett has a change of heart and offers some sort of deal to people outside Berkshire Hathaway as well.
With each game that went by, we were officially on ‘zara’ watch! You saw her world ranking go from ten thousand to five thousand, to one thousand, to five hundred, all the way to 115 after she went 16/16! 115 out of 22.7 million!
Zara made one bracket, she entered one group, and she made the bracket after watching 3 college basketball games all year in about 30 minutes total. She was 115 in the world. March doesn’t care about how well you know basketball, or how many games you watched throughout the season, it just stares you in the face and says ‘It’s you and me, let’s see what you’ve got’.
Yesterday the Sweet 16 kicked off and by now this had made out of the 1 on 1 text thread to where co-workers, friends, and even people that hadn’t been talked to in months were reaching out to share that they were rooting for Clemson, unlike any other team in the tournament! Clemson won, the world collectively jumped in the air, and Zara moved from 115 to 24. In the world. UConn won next and moved her to 23 and gave her a spot on the ESPN Leaderboard page!
After an absolute heartbreaker in the Alabama-UNC game, and then a phenomenal recovery with the correct Illinois prediction, Zara went 3/4 and sits at 203 in the world.
It’s another day, and the story now continues, we have 4 more games tonight, and 4 more teams to scream at for no other reason than how close we are to something special! Tonight that would be Marquette, Gonzaga, Houston, and Creighton.
What’s to stop the special run now? Let’s go win 4 more!
For all of you who have been following along, thank you and we hope you are enjoying the journey!
Zara, thank you as well for making a bracket that we have never seen before and giving us something to root for after burning our personal brackets days ago. We are currently watching one of the greatest ‘feel things’ of all time, and it’s absolutely special to watch!
As a Uconn fan, I never thought I’d root for Big East rivals, but this is bigger than Conference rivals.
Marquette, Gonzaga, Houston, and Creighton…..LET”S GOOOOOO!!!!!!
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