In the annual NCAA basketball tournament — March Madness as it is fondly and ubiquitously called, or sometimes “The Big Dance” — we are always on the watch for the upset. Beyond cheering on our alma mater, it is probably our favorite — and the most interesting — aspect of the tournament. If you don’t have a horse in the race, the next best thing is to root for the underdog.
It’s a microcosm of disruption theory; disruption in sweaty, athletic action.
If the upset is big enough, unlikely enough, we call it the Cinderella Story. Every iteration of March Madness has a Cinderella story — often more than one. 2018 is no different.
Defying All Predictions
Premier among Cinderella teams this year is the University of Maryland Baltimore County men’s basketball squad. In fact, many consider it the greatest Cinderella story in the history of the tournament. The UMBC Retrievers take their name from the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, a breed of dog that hails originally from their region and is the declared state dog of Maryland. UMBC has just disrupted the NCAA, historically doing what has never been done before.
They are an academically-focused university where athletics are a lower priority; they have no football team at all. They’re a young school, founded only in 1966 — that’s infancy in university years. Their website declares that they are “defined by makers, explorers, doers and dreamers,” a mission fulfilled this March in an unexpected way.
Who did they disrupt? The University of Virginia Cavaliers. UVA is right up the road from me, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, an accomplishment he had inscribed on his tombstone while not mentioning his role as President of the United States. Tradition is a big deal in such a place; the Cavalier mascot invokes the sense of solemn historicity that is visible and felt everywhere on the campus. UVA is an academic powerhouse, but frequently an athletic one too; their men’s basketball team had lost only two games this year and was the number one ranked team in the nation for most of the season.
Most importantly, UMBC was an unlikely team to claim a berth in the NCAA tournament at all, and barely did so, winning, against the odds, their conference tournament to earn a position as a 16th seed, automatically pitting them against a number one seeded team — in their case, the overall number-one ranked Virginia Cavaliers — in the first round. One seeds held a previous record of 135–0 in such contests. Most such games haven’t even been close.
UMBC pulled off what one AP sportswriter was not alone in calling “the most shocking upset in college basketball history, hammering Virginia 74–54…to become the first No.16 seed ever to beat a No. 1 seed in the men’s NCAA Tournament.”
At the end of the game, not a single one of the 1.3 million plus brackets filled out by tournament enthusiasts remained intact. Not one.
Don’t Overlook the Disruptor
Our predictive power about disruptors is demonstrably limited. It is counterintuitive to project the victory of the little guy over the dominant player in the game.
It’s why innovative products, ideas and services, as well as individual people and sports teams have a chance to get a foothold and eventually disrupt the big, strong, well-entrenched competition.
While the powerhouse is focused on its peers, the little guy is chipping away at the foundation.
Disruptors are easy to overlook; that’s one of the secrets to their success. In fact, in athletic upsets, one of the first questions asked is always if the contestant who should have won simply overlooked their competition, underestimating their power as they looked ahead to contenders more likely to give them trouble down the road. Rarely will anyone admit that that’s what happened, but it’s often clearly the case.
Of course, there’s a follow-up: in their second round game the Retrievers lost, as we would expect. That too is part of the Cinderella story. After the Big Dance often comes the hour of reckoning, when we have to accept defeat and brace ourselves for the struggle to the top again.
The Power of the Cinderella Story
As March Madness annually demonstrates, we love Cinderella stories; they have a hopeful and inspiring resonance with our own dreams of success.
We may start small and insignificant; we may be overlooked as a silly, little thing, but we too can be successful disruptors, rising to the heights. We can do it more than once if we want to — or if unfavorable circumstances force us to, which they often do.
In 2016, a group of researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide collected computer-generated story arcs, classifying each into one of six narrative types, based on what happens to the protagonist. They were inspired by the work of the late, celebrated American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, who saw a beautiful shape in every story. One of the six story trajectories is the ‘Cinderella,’ characterized by the principal character’s rise then fall then subsequent rise again.
There’s a similarity between the Cinderella story’s emotional arc and the S-curve of personal disruption. We start at the bottom. There are fits and starts along the way. We reach the top of the curve and fall, only to begin anew.
Most often we see Cinderella as proof that little people can triumph over powerful and obstructive ones. But perhaps the more important lesson of the Cinderella story is that at the stroke of midnight, riches can turn to rags, and fine carriages prove to be pumpkins after all.
I’ve had my pumpkin moments, and so, I’ll wager, have you. But after the step back — or the unintended fall — the opportunity for greatness comes knocking, glass slipper in hand.
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