Letting It Go

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[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

I have an announcement to make about a decision I recently reached. It’s an announcement that I know will make a number of people sad – and that, in turn, makes me sad. But, after ruminating on it for several weeks, I feel confident that it’s the right decision. And I feel that today, the last weekday before the men’s and women’s Final Fours, is the right time to announce it. So here goes.

I have decided that this year’s Living Room Times NCAA basketball pools, the 20th annual, will also be the last annual. I’m going to stop running the pools, starting next year.

Allow me to explain why. Or try to, anyway.

The pools, which were once an absolute joy to run, and which once immeasurably enhanced my own personal viewing experience of the NCAA Tournament, have increasingly become more of a chore and a source of stress. They’re not solely that, certainly. But gradually, over time, the stress has increased and the joy has decreased. And the pools have also, I believe, begun to detract from my personal viewing experience of the tourney.

That’s not to say I hate running the pools, by any means. There are moments when I really enjoy the added layer of March Madness drama that they generate – for example, this year, tracking how long @KingCambie (who correctly picked both UAB and Georgia State, and also correctly didn’t pick too many other first-round upsets) could remain undefeated.

In those moments, the drama of the pool enhances the drama of the tournament. And yet, overall, the perceived need to constantly check on the pool, and keep things updated online, becomes a drain on my time (and sleep), and causes me to spend a combined total of many hours during the tournament looking at, and tweeting about, pool standings and scenarios, instead of watching basketball games.

These problems (which are, I recognize, #firstworldproblems of the highest order) have gotten worse as the pools have gotten bigger, for several reasons. For context, back in 2004, the 9th annual men’s pool had 76 contestants, pretty much all friends and family. As my old blog’s audience grew, the pool grew too, nearly doubling to 135 a year later in 2005. But those were still mostly either real-life friends/family or blog “regulars,” so it still felt like a fairly tight-knit group, with meaningful “bragging rights” at stake. Then Hurricane Katrina happened, I had my 15 minutes of fame, my blog’s audience exploded, and the size of the pool shot up to 218 in 2006 – almost triple its size from two years earlier. It’s been in the 200s ever since, and even crossed the 300 mark last year, with 305 contestants.

At first, this expansion was awesome. It felt exciting, it stroked my ego, and I loved it. But it also had several side effects that were less positive. First of all, because I insist on running the pool myself with (awesome) software on my laptop – not through ESPN or Yahoo or whatever, with their far less customizable scoring systems and their lack of robust scenario-generating tools – a lot more contestants meant a lot more work for me, first in getting the pool up & running, then in tracking the results and (especially) the scenarios for upcoming potential outcomes.

Also, the larger sample size of contestants made my favorite part of the tournament, the first weekend, generally less interesting in the pool, because there were usually large clumps of people tied with one another, instead of individuals or very small groups battling for the top spots. This year was an exception, thanks to @KingCambie’s exceptional, perhaps unprecedented success. But typically, in a larger pool, it takes longer before “separation” appears in the standings, which in turn makes tracking the pool in the early rounds feel less dramatic and exciting, and more like a homework assignment.

Another crucial issue is quite simply the shrinking of my available free time. I’m no longer a high school or college or law school student. I’m a lawyer, an actual productive member of society [insert lawyer jokes here – but remember, I’m a defense lawyer, so calibrate your quips accordingly], with clients and bosses and billable hour requirements and whatnot. That’s not a new development, of course: I’ve been a practicing lawyer for almost 6 ½ years, which, come to think of it, is also probably the approximate length of time during which I have slowly become less and less enamored of running these pools. (It really has been a very gradual process, like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of warming water.)

I’m also, of course, a husband and a father of three, which makes it harder to justify spending so much of what limited free time I do have, for 3+ weeks every year, working on these pools. Between the two NCAA pools, the NIT pool, and my firm’s office pool, I typically spend March and early April administering four simultaneous basketball contests. Those hours, alas, are not billable. 🙂 Nor are they quality family time. So they’re tough to square with my priorities – unless they’re incredibly fun and deeply worthwhile for me personally. Which, increasingly, they aren’t.

That brings me to the final key point. As they’ve grown, the pools have inevitably gotten more and more “impersonal,” gradually coming to feel like less of a family & friends & “regulars” pool, and more of a broad online contest featuring an awful lot of acquaintances and strangers. Now, when I say that, I truly do not mean to insult or demean the wonderful contributions of the pool contestants – some of them annual participants over many years – who have joined via the Internet despite not knowing me “in real life.” I totally and unreservedly appreciate their participation. What’s more, I have made new friends thanks to the pools, which is awesome. The issue is not with any particular person or group of people, but rather, with the slowly evolving aggregate effects of how the pool has evolved over time.

When a high schooler I’d never met named Justin Vale won the 2003 pool – with a funny back-story about his critical pick, and a wow-what-a-small-world connection to my hometown – it was a fun novelty. But after a while, the novelty wore off, and I came to miss the days when I would keep score of how many pool winners came from the “Newington group” and how many from the “USC group” – a notion that reflects the pool’s origin as a contest among people who I had met and befriended among various phases of my childhood and early adulthood. It’s different now. Nobody from either of those “groups” has won a pool since 2007.

In the seven years of completed NCAA pools since 2008, just 2 out of the 14 winners (men’s and women’s pools) have been people that I’ve met “in real life.” A couple more are connected to my personal friends/family in a Kevin Bacon sort of way, and some are people I consider online friends (via my blog or, now, Twitter). Others are total strangers. Now, let me be clear. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a “stranger,” or a loose acquaintance, or an “online-only” friend, joining my pools, and absolutely nothing wrong with them winning. Their #EternalGlory is worth as much as anyone else’s. (I enthusiastically invited the public to join my pools, after all!) And sometimes, as the @KingCambie example shows, the drama and storyline of the pool is awesome regardless of whether I’ve met the people in question, and regardless of whether the group of contestants is small and “tight-knit” or large and sprawling.

But when, year after year, not just some, not just many, but nearly all of the folks winning (and competing for) the pool championship are people I’ve never met in real life, the unintended consequence of this evolution is a gradual decrease in my enjoyment of the pools. These free, moneyless, bragging-rights-only contents have become, for me personally, less compelling to track and update than in the old days, when it was my high-school classmates against my college friends against my wife’s family members and so forth. That’s nobody’s fault, and I wouldn’t do anything differently if I had it to do all over again. It’s just how it is.

All of this has, as I said, been nagging at me for some years now. But I didn’t allow myself to seriously contemplate the possibility of ending the Living Room Times pools, mainly because it’s hard to give up something that you’ve been doing for so long. I announced the first pool (or “poll,” as I misspelled it initially) in the pages of the March 14, 1996 issue of The Living Room Times, the unofficial newspaper of Newington High School that I wrote and designed on my family’s Compaq ProLinea in Microsoft Publisher running Windows 3.1, printed out on our Canon Bubble Jet printer, and brought to school to show my friends. I was a freshman in high school. Bill Clinton was a first-term president, most Americans had never heard of Osama bin Laden, The Birdcage was #1 at the box office, and Mariah Carey and Celine Dion were battling it out on the Billboard charts. It was a long time ago.

And I’ve been doing the pools ever since – for two full decades now. Which is amazing, because in terms of self-made traditions and annual events, there is basically nothing else in my life that I’ve been doing every single year for 20 consecutive years. (My marriage is almost exactly half the age of my pools. My oldest daughter is barely a third of the pools’ age.) I am an inherently nostalgic person, someone who values traditions and rituals, and this annual ritual has outlasted anything else that I’ve ever come up with. So, for that reason if nothing else, it is difficult to come to terms with the idea of shutting it down.

But sometimes, traditions run their course, and rituals become chores. When repetition and transformation begin to sap the joy out of an activity that was once a highlight of the annual calendar, but has gradually come to feel more like an annual time-sink, well, maybe it’s time to move on to something else.

Roughly three weeks ago, with (unlike now!) mercifully little time for pondering and hand-wringing, I made a snap decision not to run an NIT Pool this year – because I was in the midst of a family vacation in Florida on Selection Sunday, and setting up a fourth pool was just too much extra work under the circumstances. Upon making and executing this decision, I was startled to realize that I did not feel a sense of regret or loss. Instead, unmistakably and uncomplicatedly, I felt a sense of relief. Not “having to” do all that setting up and promoting and watching and uploading and updating was a huge weight off my mind. And, deep down, to my great surprise, I found myself wishing that I didn’t “have to” do it for the NCAA Tournaments either. That’s when the light bulb finally went on: Brendan Loy, this isn’t fun for you anymore. It’s time to stop.

Some readers (if anyone has actually read this far) may object: “Well, why don’t you keep the pool going, but do it in a simpler way, like via ESPN or Yahoo? And update it less often? And quit worrying about future scenarios?” Part of the answer is that, as with a planned Twitter hiatus, I know I wouldn’t stick to any such scaled-back plan – I would inevitably end up posting lots of updates, calculating scenarios, and so forth, because I would feel internally obligated to do so. I don’t like to half-ass things. I’m either in, or I’m out.

Which leads to the second part of the answer: I don’t want to put this tradition on life support just for the sake of keeping it alive. The Living Room Times NCAA Pools have been awesome for 20 years. If they’re going to continue, then they should continue to be awesome. If they aren’t going to be awesome, then I’d rather pull the plug than let them linger in a lesser form, continuing on indefinitely as a shadow of their former selves, simply to run the clock up to 25 or 30 years or whatever. That would be like Michael Jordan coming out of retirement to play for the Wizards, or Peter Jackson returning to Middle-earth to make a crappy prequel trilogy. Such half-assery would be unworthy of the greatness that it seeks to follow up on. So I’m not gonna do it.

If I love the pool, I have to let it go. And the milestone 20th annual year is the perfect time to stop.

(Having said all that: if somebody else wants to take over running and administering the Living Room Times pools – lock, stock and barrel – with me having no role whatsoever except as a participant, I am willing to entertain such an offer. I’m not sure I would accept it; I said “entertain.” For the same reasons that I don’t want to half-ass it, I also wouldn’t want someone else to half-ass it. So I’m not sure if I would want to hand the reins over to someone else. But if you’re interested, shoot me an e-mail at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com, and I’ll listen.)

I will continue to love March Madness. (Indeed, I think this decision will allow me to fall back in love with March Madness all over again.) I will continue to tweet about it, or Instagram about it, or whatever the publishing medium du jour becomes. And, most assuredly, I will continue to do the #GiantBracket. That thing, inspired by The Mid-Majority’s 2010 “As You Go Bracket Contest,” has supplanted the LRT pools as my favorite March Madness tradition. I’ve been doing it for five years running now. And it’s not just my tradition – it’s a family tradition, which is great. The girls look forward to it every year (this year, I let Loyette do her own #GiantBracket for the women’s tournament), and even Becky has warmed up to it (especially now that I’ve started taping thick construction paper to the back of the bracket, so the markers don’t bleed through to the wall like “WICHITA!!!!!” did in 2013). I imagine the #GiantBracket tradition will grow and evolve as our kids do, which is what traditions are supposed to do. I can’t wait.

Also, because I will still need to scratch my bracket-comparing, scenario-calculating itch every March, I intend to continue running my firm’s office pool, which is much, much smaller than the LRT pools, and therefore less time-consuming and more personal and fun. It also involves, shall we say, more tangible stakes. 🙂 And, importantly, running that pool will also give me an easy way to continue our annual friendly bracket competition within the immediate family.

What about my other annual online traditions? The Oscar Pool and Live-Chat, which is more of a small and intimate event (like the NCAA pools once were), will certainly continue for the foreseeable future. (Who knows; maybe it’ll eventually get up to 20+ years. This year was the 11th annual.) And I’ll probably keep doing the Bowl Pick ‘em Contest, currently at 10 years & counting. That contest, for various reasons, feels like much less of a chore and a time-sink than the NCAA pools have become. It also doesn’t have all the NCAA pools’ historical baggage of trying to remain a contest among “real people” using their real names and whatnot. Bowl Pick ’em is a simple, fun, easy-to-administer Internet contest, and that’s fine.

But anyway. I’ll stop rambling. I just wanted to let you all know now, before the tournaments end and Eternal Glory is awarded, that this will be the last time that happens. And I wanted to explain why in one fell swoop, rather than in a bunch of 140-character bursts. I didn’t intend to write a novel, but it turns out I had a lot to say about this. Heh.

I’ll conclude with a message to the six people still alive in the men’s pool and the four still alive in the women’s pool. Take note: you are competing for the most “eternal” Eternal Glory of all: title of the last-ever Living Room Times NCAA pool champion.

Good luck. 🙂