Using Sports Expert Advice to Fill Out Brackets is 'Bracket Plagiarism'

As we embark this week on one of the year’s most popular and anticipated sporting events, the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament or March Madness I have stumbled upon an idea or opinion that I apparently have been on the minority side of and never knew it.

Every year during the days that precede the beginning of March Madness I, like many millions of other Americans, find a bracket of the matchups and fill it out to compete with a group of others doing the same. I fill the bracket out without the help of television or Internet experts telling me who to pick and this has served me quite well in the past leading me to win multiple brackets. I’m not a risky bracket picker. I pick very few upsets, maybe fewer than most. Sometimes this bites me, but I’d rather be bitten by a 15-seed upsetting a 2-seed or a 14-seed upsetting a 3-seed than going for broke or against the odds and not having it play out. This is my strategy for trying to win. But, no matter what my picks are mine 100 percent of the time without any influence from other individuals. The only influences I’ll use are obvious things like seeding, records and other basketball statistics.

I believe this is the only right way to pick a bracket. This is a thought that until this week I believed that I shared with the majority of people who fill out brackets.

Apparently it’s not.

I posed the question of whether or not it was wrong to use expert advice to fill out a bracket on my sports podcast’s Facebook page and the majority response was that it’s not wrong to do so. I was shocked.

To me it would seem obvious that using experts on ESPN or YahooSports.com or any other sports television network or website would be essentially cheating.

Why do I consider this cheating?

It’s cheating because it’s passing off the knowledge or opinion of somebody else as your own. When you fill out a bracket in competition against other people it should be completely yours. Using advice from outside sources effectively makes any potential win or gain from your bracket not completely yours and thus isn’t as much of an accomplishment as winning your bracket tournament on your own accord would be.    

Some people may not give a damn about that, especially if they are playing for money (something I personally do not do). They may consider a win a win and using all means necessary to receive monetary gain fair game. I have no way of stopping people from doing this, barring getting my entire bracket group of people together the minute after the brackets are unveiled to make their picks immediately.

But, I definitely view using others’ advice to fill out your bracket to be a cheap and unfair way to compete in a bracket tournament. I liken it to Googling answers during a trivia competition. You are passing off knowledge as your own that isn’t. Some people may not agree with this comparison, but I don’t understand how they could deny it.

Using experts to help fill out your bracket is essentially plagiarism. You are using the ideas and thoughts of others for your own use. It very well may be considered commonplace when it comes to filling out your March Madness bracket to use outside help, but it’s wrong.

So, if you’re like I and you fill out your bracket on your own good for you. It’s the only right way to do so and if you win you’ll truly have all of the bragging rights and pride that comes with the accomplishment of beating everybody else. But, if you use outside help to fill out your bracket and win you don’t really have the right to gloat, because it’s just as much Jay Bilas’ and Dick Vitale’s and Doug Gottlieb’s and any other experts’ bracket just as much as it is your own. And, if you happen to win money doing that, well, those experts really deserve a cut.