While sitting through my 10,000th day of March Madness, I decided to make this somehow interesting for myself so that I don’t drown in my absolute disgust from what this time of year brings around. ALL it is- endless freaking basketball and everyone pissed off about some college I haven’t ever heard of messing up everyone’s entire bracket. I am not one of you loonies, this isn’t my thing. I have always said the best basketball court is the one covered in a wrestling mat. (Literally come at me about it, bro. I have lived so many days just watching this orange ball bounce I could be rabid. Beware.) The child that lives in this household that shares that same feeling about wrestling mats is finishing up his last few months of college, so I am overruled and March Madness stays on the TV for the month yet again. By the very end I am begging for anything but college basketball, but this year, I decided to do a science experiment during this terrible time in my life to make it interesting.
As I sit here and listen to the announcers ramble on and on (stfu Bob Costas… we know they are playing basketball, bro.) about so and so’s dad played in the league, or so and so’s mom played at Northwestern in the 80’s, this other guy is a legacy player (a player who has multiple generations of athletes)- all of this has made me think. How many of these kids’ parents are D1 or pro athletes? The results are interesting: approximately 25-30% of these young men who are currently playing in your March Madness brackets have parents that were doing the same thing they are doing now … but only 40 years ago. That makes you think even more deeply into it; how do genetics actually tie into this … or is it that they have done nothing but eat, breathe and sleep in a gym since they were old enough to walk?
On one hand, some of these athletes look like someone built them in a lab and receive replacement parts for the newest model each quarter. They’re faster, stronger, and apparently the rules of gravity do not pertain to them as they are jumping at a height than I would ever feel safe climbing up on a ladder. On the other hand, there are players who look like the kid down the street that just discovered protein shakes last Thursday, but they are out dropping 25 easily in a Sweet 16 game.
So, which one determines who is playing on the courts during March Madness, genetics or environment? It’s messy and slightly unpredictable, but since it is so much better than watching them run the length of that court again, let me break it down for you. Honestly, I am begging you to let me yap about anything at this point that doesn’t involve basketball.
As you know, genetics are the blueprint to a human. If genetics are the blueprint, then training, the environment and the opportunity you have growing up are the contractors who decide if you are the dude with the McMansion or the house that has a folding chair as its living room furniture.
We all know that the guys with the training, the environment and the opportunities are going to have better odds. That’s a given. But let’s focus on the science part of this entire situation. This is where you let the book brilliant girl geek out on genetics for a few minutes, but I’ll make it painless. I read the 45 studies that have been published on these types of questions so you didn’t have to, I’m just going to break it down so that you know who to marry so you can have some little D1 athlete babies. I got you.
Experts estimate that 30-70% of athletic performance can be influenced by genetics. That’s an insane range, which basically means “congratulations! All the science shit we did came up with the confirmation of “It depends”. Some athletes are naturally wired for power and speed- looking at you, Usain Bolt; The dude’s muscle fiber type is fast twitching, which is what allows more speed and power into his movement versus the slower twitching type, which will give you endurance. (I got neither- I am sure there is a scientific review of this somewhere!) Your genetics will also give you your height, limb length, body proportions, your natural (without practice) coordination, reaction time and endurance capacity all come from genetics. These attributes are obviously not something you can go to the gym and grind out. No amount of hustle or work ethic is going to turn a 5’8 guard into a 7-foot-tall giant blocking every shot.
Obviously enhancing those genetics will make you better the more you practice, but genetics give you a genetic “ceiling”, if you will. Basically, your genes set your “ceiling”- what your body is naturally set up for. Practice, training, repetition and development can account for another 30-50% of performance outcomes. Another huge gap in statistics, but that is incredibly hard to pin down, as the kid with the work ethic like Michael Jordan is going to obviously make it farther than the genetically excellent kid who plays Fortnite all day and hasn’t left his room in a week. We don’t know how much or little a person will put into something, so that makes it incredibly difficult to give a narrower gap.
But here is the part that is a little harder to talk about or the parts that maybe some don’t want to admit, but it absolutely matters – Environment and access. Roughly 10-25% of the current flock of D1 athletes grew up with one or both parents playing college or professional sports. At that point, its not that your parents created a genetically perfect lab specimen that inherited every good gene, it’s the fact that you understand the game before you can talk, you are on the court/field as soon as you can walk, you have access to better coaching, and you are training and conditioning for your chosen sport before most kids even ever play their first game of t-ball.
This is the part that isn’t “born different” and more “raised in this shit”.
But even that doesn’t guarantee a damn thing. If it did, every former athlete’s kid would be dancing through this March Madness bracket and that is very much not the case (ask anyone ever that ended up with a busted bracket.)
So, we know you can be genetically superior, you can have lived the superior life and had the superior environment to be a D1 baller; but here is where you toss in a handful of change into the clothes dryer of life and see where the cash falls; what I will refer to as “the intangibles”. The things you can’t be born with and what you don’t pick up during a visit at the gym. These are the things you see on this year’s High Point University team… the things that are going to piss you off because they just jacked your entire bracket.
Confidence can be approximately 10-15% of why a team would win.
Coaching can be around 15-20% of why a team would cause a major upset (Hey Curt Cignetti… I see you. I named my dog after you, my guy!)
Chemistry can be a huge make or break for a team. That percentage is around 10-20%, but in my opinion I would rank it more in the 30-40%, as I have seen it work with my own two eyeballs.
And then there is 5-10% of pure, random bullshit. The bad calls, shooting streaks, the dude making 2 points in the entire game, but it was the game winning shot… all the shit that will send you over the edge that we can’t attribute to anything but luck of the draw.
All these statistics I have looked at 40 times to make sure they were correct? This is all the things that make March “Madness”. It’s literally just a mix of everything that you were born with, you learned, you practiced, you were coached and some random wild bullshit peppered in to make this one of the wildest times of the year.
But the wildest thing of all this “madness?” Only about 6% of athletes make it into college sports at any level. So, the fact that these kids even made it to March Madness is insanely rare. But the real secret is… most of these players are not “legacy” athletes. It just feels that way because the media wants you to hear what they want you to hear. *shrugs shoulders*.