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No bracket-busting makes for a boring tournament
03/30/07
by Clay

This is the worst NCAA Tournament of my lifetime. March has been decidedly lacking in madness and there has been no real underdog to root for in the entire tournament.

Worse, there have been hardly any upsets for even a single game. Virginia Commonwealth over Duke is as close as we've come. That or UNLV over Wisconsin (the only team seeded in the top eight to fail to advance to the Elite Eight).

In fact there has been just one recurring story line: Favorite comes back from (insert deficit here) to triumph. It's gotten to the point where late on Saturday afternoon I even tried to convince myself that UCLA was the huge underdog against Kansas in a thinly veiled attempt to craft one out of a tournament of favorites. Yep, welcome to the 2007 NCAA Tournament, where a two seed with 11 national titles is the biggest underdog of the tournament.

Plainly, this wouldn't do. That's because I approach each NCAA Tournament as an opportunity to fervently root for teams I otherwise couldn't place in the correct state. The tourney is the great equalizer, a time when small schools who have spent their entire season watching the large schools play on national television finally have an opportunity to match up against them. And occasionally win.

So I've spent dozens of hours rooting for underdogs since the tourney tipped off on March 15. Usually rooting for the underdogs is difficult because the favorites tend to find ways to win. But the unbridled joy and excitement when the underdog actually wins helps to counteract this imbalance. Not this year, though. Because rooting for the underdogs has been downright brutal. No matter what manner of obstacle the favorite faces -- a 20-point deficit, starting center or power forward fouled out of the game, an intentional foul that doesn't get called leading to an overtime victory or a travel in the lane on the final shot that isn't called -- the favorite is finding a way to win.

Regarding the travel, I was watching the Vandy game in a packed sports bar here in Nashville. Just as Georgetown passed the ball in on their final possession trailing by one, I turned to my friend Tardio amid an absolutely deafening bar and said, "This is the most important 14 seconds in the history of Vanderbilt athletics." And then Jeff Green hit that shot, and the entire bar went silent.

In my entire life I've never heard a bar get that quiet so quickly. From drunken pandemonium to nary a chair leg being scooted in an instant. But really, for anyone who follows Vanderbilt athletics, Green's crazy game-winning shot was almost expected. Just the latest page in astoundingly close losses for Vanderbilt athletics.

Since just about every underdog on earth was losing and I didn't have any legit ones to root for, I ended up ruminating upon the history of the word "underdog" itself. Despite using the word 10,000 or more times in my life, it occurred to me that I had no idea where the word underdog came from. And before there weren't any underdogs to root for, I'd never really thought how odd of a phrase it is.

Underdog is the kind of word immigrants spend decades trying to make sense of and then never can because we can't even make sense of the word ourselves. Nevertheless, we root for underdogs to triumph over favorites. So inculcated is the underdog in our culture that we have movies that embrace the term as their actual titles, Underdog an August 2007 release, within movie subtitles Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and have a college basketball tournament that takes as its founding ethos the idea that every underdog has a chance at the ultimate championship.

Even when, like this season, the top dogs have won virtually every game. But where in the world did the term underdog originally come from? For a nation that embraces the word with an almost evangelical passion, especially come March, you get the idea you could enter a bar full of basketball fans rooting for the underdog and no one would know where the word actually came from. I certainly didn't. So I made five telephone calls in an effort to find out what everyone else thought the etymology of the word was. And by everyone, I mean five friends.

Before you read any further you might want to construct your own underdog hypothesis (this way you won't have to go back to actually working as fast.)

OK, here were their legitimate hypotheses for where the term underdog came from:

Kelly: "Dog racing. And the disfavored dog is the underdog. Otherwise there is no rational reason why you would refer to any person as a dog. So I'm going dog-based sport."

Neville: "Underdog comes from the smallest dog in the litter who would hide under his mom's belly when other dogs were fighting or playing around or doing whatever puppies do."

J.T.: "I would say the term is derived from early Britain, perhaps from some contest involving knights. When a knight was terrible at jousting and swordplay and whatnot he was deemed lower than a dog or "underdog." So when the "underdog" claimed victory in the knightly games it was a huge shock to everyone in attendance and they would all shout with glee while eating their turkey legs with their few remaining teeth and shouting out taunts like 'tosser,' 'wanker,' and 'bugger.'"

Junaid: "Is there such thing as an overdog and if so would that lead us to the answer? It's got to be some form of dog racing. Yeah, just dog racing and the slower dog would be the underdog."

My wife, Lara: "It comes from the old Peanuts cartoon. Snoopy was the top dog and every other dog that wasn't Snoopy was the underdog."

My own hypothesis: From teams of sled dogs in the snow. It's my contention that there is one place on the sled team that is a worse position than any other and those dogs in that position are known as the underdogs.

As you can see each of these opinions was somewhat unique. They probably represent a rough cross-section of what most people would guess. All were unpolluted by the ideas of others. And I didn't even try and research the etymology of underdog before asking everyone because I didn't want to give away anything by the tone of my questioning. All of them seemed like legit hypotheses with the exception of J.T. and my wife's. But my wife responded with such conviction on the Peanuts angle that I almost believed her. Only none of these hypotheses are remotely correct.

At least not according to Wikipedia:

"The origin of the word 'underdog' comes from naval shipbuilding when the planks of wood were sawn for their construction. The logs of wood were placed over a pit on planks of wood called "dogs" (a bit like fire dogs). The senior sawsman stood on top of the plank and he was the overdog. The junior had to go into the pit and saw and of course he got covered in saw dust. He was the 'underdog.'"

So, you know, since we really haven't had an underdog to root for this tournament at least next year you can win some beer money by being the only person who knows where the word comes from. See, reading the ClayNation column when you're supposed to be keyciting your partner's exhilarating brief on the commerce clause violation of dairy regulations does pay off.

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