Screenshot taken from The New York Times’s The Upshot.
March Madness 2015, the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Basketball Tournament starts this Thursday, March 19. By now, fans are scrambling to perfect their brackets before the games. Brackets are tree diagrams that outline the series of games played during the tournament. Millions of college basketball fans go through the process of filling out brackets to predict the winners of each game. Typically fans either fill out printable brackets that can be downloaded online from websites like ESPN or they can fill out their brackets online and print them. And then there is always the old-fashion way of sketching and filling out brackets by hand.
With this year’s March Madness upon us, The Upshot introduced a new kind of bracket. The New York Times’s N.C.A.A. bracket game is titled “An N.C.A.A. Bracket for Risk-Takers,” because the more unpopular picks are worth more points. The Upshot claims, “you can fill it out like any other bracket — but it’s not like any other bracket.” The Upshot is a New York Times website dedicated to providing news and analysis about politics, policy and everyday life using graphics and interactive features.
Screenshot of The New York Times’s N.C.A.A March Madness bracket taken from The Upshot.
The Upshot’s customizable visualization and infographic elements are what make this portal not only unique but successful, in that readers are able to better understand and interpret the news given the opportunity to interact with the content. In this spirit of The Upshot’s emphasis on interactive interplay, the New York Times created a March Madness bracket that is different than the others. This bracket takes an alternative approach to the traditional scoring system in the March Madness pool: “Instead of fixing the number of points for each game, we let the market decide: The more people who choose a certain team to win, the lower your reward for picking that team.” The complete breakdown of the bracket rules can be read in The Upshot’s article “Here’s How Our N.C.A.A. Bracket Works.” Essentially, the more uncommon a fan’s picks are, the more points he or she will be awarded if those picks are correct.
Screenshot of link to the New York Times’s The Upshot bracket game with interactive features taken from the New York Times.
The Upshot allows fans to sign in or create an account to save their bracket and see their results. The Upshot also provides a scoreboard, which features a continuously updated overview of current points for correct upset picks and the percent of readers picking each team to win. The Times‘s bracket game is a creative and exciting way to mix up the traditional bracket competition among fans, and encourages them to take risks. The bracket’s interactive elements provide fans with a new, immersive way to experience and follow the championship, and entertain their March Madness fever.
Furthermore, the “N.C.A.A. Bracket for Risk-Takers” game is a real contest that begins on March 15, 2015, at 7:00:01 p.m. ET and ends on March 19, 2015 an hour before the first tipoff of the Round of 64. More information on the official rules and terms of entry can be found at the bottom of the “Here’s How Our N.C.A.A. Bracket Works” article. The winner will receive an Apple Watch. In this, The Upshot is not only welcoming a web-based, interactive bracket to the March Madness scene, it is also inviting fans to participate in a national competition by playing a unique version of the bracket game. In doing so, The Upshot is increasing viewer traffic to its website, and using the power of web-driven interaction technology to prove why it is one of the best sites for retrieving the news.
Sarah E. McCullough 