Yahoo News’ Capitol Hill Bracket Challenge
The only bipartisan consensus in Congress is that the University of Kentucky will go undefeated and win the NCAA national title.
Politicians are overscheduled, overprogrammed and overreliant on talking points — unless they’re watching or debating sports.
President Barack Obama famously and repeatedly has cited ESPN’s “SportsCenter” as the one show he watches daily. And it turns out that watching it is not a partisan habit.
RELATED: Join the Best Bracket Pool on Yahoo Sports before it’s too late for shot at $50K
In March, the Capitol makes special accommodations for lawmakers and their staffs to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. Senate and House committees order that the Capitol’s cable packages include channels airing the games. The televisions in the private, members-only cloakrooms are commandeered so members can watch basketball between votes.
In my five years of covering Capitol Hill, I’m relatively confident that the most honest and real conversations I’ve ever had with lawmakers are about sports. Politicians feel less guarded talking about last night’s Kentucky game than the the buzzy political story du jour (though I’d be lying if I denied using the first kind of conversation to build a personal rapport that makes the second kind of conversation more fruitful).
Sports are one of the rare activities that make politicians people, too. In a day and age when friendships are dwindling in inverse proportion to the number of flights politicians take out of town, you can pick out some of the people who actually like each other by their sports-related ribbing.
Enter Yahoo News’ Capitol Hill Bracket Challenge. We’ve got brackets from a half-dozen members — including Speaker John Boehner of Ohio — that reveal more than these politicians’ parochial biases or sports acumen. They will also show whether Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., is correct in his assessment that no one knows more about college basketball than his colleague, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
“Thune. Hands down,” Hoeven told Yahoo News, when asked which of his colleagues knew the most about hoops.
But “Hoev,” as Thune calls him, qualified his praise of his friend with an important and controversial point about March Madness pool etiquette: “By the way, he's a multiple-sheet guy. Which you’re not supposed to do. You pick a sheet, and that’s it! But he knows the most about basketball.”
Thune himself later conceded that he picked Kentucky to win it all in the bracket he submitted to Yahoo News, but wanted to fill out a second sheet where Kentucky didn’t run the table, just in case.
Both Hoeven and Thune picked Kentucky to win it all. So did Boehner, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
For the readers who doubt that there is actually any bipartisan consensus in Washington — even on basketball — you can scope out everyone’s picks in the Capitol Hill Yahoo Fantasy pool.
But Hoyer, a longtime basketball fanatic who attends handfuls of University of Maryland games each season, sent the following disclaimer with his Wildcats pick: “I didn’t want to jinx Maryland by picking them against Kentucky — but I think Maryland is going to beat Kentucky! Go Terps!”
The only politician who didn’t select Kentucky to go all the way? Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He picked, you guessed it, the West Virginia Mountaineers.
When Thune and Hoeven were informed of Manchin’s unorthodox choice of national champion, Thune said, “Well, you know, sometimes you just gotta...” before he was cut off by Hoeven.
“Who took West Virginia?” Hoeven asked. “That was a total political pick, right?”
The two senators swapped their Final Four and upset selections, with Thune high on the Virginia Cavaliers (“Defense wins," Thune said, while Hoeven countered, “They’re great on defense, they’re great on tempo, I just think they’ll have trouble scoring” without a fully healthy Justin Anderson).
Hoeven wondered whether No. 1 seed Wisconsin might have enough power to upset Kentucky and prove everyone, including these politicians, wrong. “Frank the Tank, baby!” he exclaimed, referring to the Badgers’ dominant big man, Frank Kaminsky.
Of course, politicians being politicians, many of the brackets submitted did give local teams a subtle edge. Portman had No. 6 seed Xavier advancing to the Elite 8, in addition to No. 11 seed Dayton pulling an upset of a different six-seed across the bracket. Hoeven had North Dakota State advancing to the Sweet 16. “They're going to have a hard time against Gonzaga,” Hoeven laughs. “I had to go with my heart on that one.”
Hoyer has his beloved Terrapins losing to Kentucky in the Round of 16, jinx or no jinx.
At the end of their talk about basketball with Yahoo News, Thune suggested to Hoeven that perhaps the two of them could take a trip to Indianapolis to watch the Final Four together, in person on April 4.
Yahoo News asked if we also were invited.
“Sure, you can chronicle it,” Thune said. “‘John and John’s Excellent Adventure.”
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