America’s Favorite Pastime

Average weight of NCAA Men’s basketball: 22 ounces; Tallest NCAA Team: Duke, average of 6’7″; Network advertising revenue for March Madness: $1.32 billion; Increase in pizza orders during tournament: 19%; Increase in vasectomy rate during tournament: 50%

Once, before my husband was my husband, we were having one of those talks, the kind where you’re meant to feel the other one out about your future plans. Did we want kids? We both did. How many? Not more than two. After that, he said, he’d get a vasectomy.

The suggestion surprised me—he isn’t exactly the type to volunteer for elective surgery.

“Only thing is,” he said. “It’d have to be during March Madness.”

I imagine I just ogled him then, thrown by the thought of scheduling one’s surgery around a sporting event, the fact that he’d chosen this particular event, and that he’d even thought about it at all. If a rabid fan of anything, my husband is into football. I’d never heard him talk about a college basketball team the way he talked about the Eagles, or even Ohio State.

“If ever there were a three-day window to be trapped on the couch with an ice pack, it’d be during the tournament,” he said nonchalantly.

And reader, in this line of thinking my husband is not alone. As it turns out, March Madness vasectomies are apparently a thing; the rate of surgeries scheduled in the days leading up to the tournament surge by 50%.

But men of the reproductive surgical recovery ward are only a fraction of fans who uphold March Madness as something of a cultural phenomenon. Last year’s tournament had over 97 million US viewers, and was broadcast in 180 countries. Networks raked in over a billion dollars in advertising revenue, while companies across the country reported over a billion dollars in losses spent on wages of workers who were sneaking off to watch the games. No other college sporting event, nor most professional ones, compare—it’s a nationwide appeal is second only to the NFL Playoffs and Super Bowl. And the players aren’t even professionals.

For myself, I’d never really been interested in basketball. As an undergraduate, my school had pretty much no sports teams (unless you count Quidditch), so I’d never seen much of the tournament before. As for the pros, I found the NBA frustrating—the whole thing seemed about the genetic predisposition of a couple guys to be giant more than a strategy or skillset, the opposite of the technical precision I’d come to love in a sport like baseball. Plus, all the action happened in the last minute and a half. With...