Newspaper Page Text
OPINION
THE CHAMPION, THURSDAY, MARCH 7 - 13, 2024 • PAGE 5
March Madness is nothing but fun
Postseason basketball is
underway at the high school and
college levels, but it's not just the
24 Dekalb high schools that earned
playoff spots or the alumni looking
for March Madness berths that
makes this the best time of the
year for myself and countless other
sports fans.
Even for people who aren't
die-hard basketball fans, "March
Madness"—and the other
nicknames given to the postseason
tournaments in amateur and semi-
professional basketball leagues—still
holds some of the sports world's
most exciting moments.
The combination of how
basketball is played and how the
sports' postseason tournaments
are generally operated makes
postseason basketball the ultimate
"anything can happen" moment in
sports.
Take some of the recent NCAA
Tournament upsets for example,
JAY PHILLIPS
starting with University of Virginia—
the top team in 2018—losing to
the lowest-ranked team in the 2018
tournament. Fairleigh Dickinson did
something similar in 2023, upsetting
No. 1 Purdue.
It's the nature of basketball,
where only five athletes from
each team are on the court at one
time and where one athlete can
dominate a game - or where the
absence of another athlete can
crush a team's chances - that gives
anyone a chance in any game.
Additionally, postseason
tournaments outside of professional
basketball are single-game
elimination tournaments that pit the
best teams against the worst teams
in a field ranging from 32 teams to
68 teams.
This format results in a lot of
upsets and a lot of fun underdog
moments. Such as in the upset
over Virginia in 2018, University
of Maryland Baltimore County—a
school most people had never heard
of—had an extremely undersized
player lead his team to victory
against a Virginia team that had a
historically elite defense.
These are two teams would
have likely never played—especially
in a meaningful game—if it wasn't
for the quirky format of the NCAA
Tournament. However, their
game resulted in one of the most
memorable in college sports history.
Once teams advance through the
tournaments' fields, games usually
start to get close as players from
both teams know their season could
be over at the end of the game. The
close games give the tournaments
a unique intensity and feed into the
"anything can happen" narrative.
Postseason basketball becomes
even more fun for Dekalb fans
adding local allegiances to the
picture.
Dekalb had 24 playoff teams
to start the postseason and seven
region tournament champions.
Additionally, local alumni are aiding
their college teams to tournament
bids with Terrance Edwards
(who went from Tucker to James
Madison University), Eric Gaines
(who went from Lithonia to LSU
to UAB), and KD Johnson (who
went from Southwest Dekalb to
UGA to Auburn) all eyeing NCAA
Tournament appearances.
Visit thechampionnewspaper.
com for high school postseason
schedules and get your tournament-
basketball fix before it's too late.
This is a test; this is only a test
- followed by a series of sharp,
pitching squeaks and clicks on your
typical AM radio dial. This was
a weekly test of the Emergency
Broadcast System (EBS). The EBS
was in place from 1963-1997,
ostensibly to provide a United States
president with an expeditious way
to broadcast emergency alerts in
times of war, natural disasters or
any other grave national crisis.
In the early morning hours
of Thursday, Feb. 22, as a major
cellular phone system outage
blanketed multiple metropolitan
areas, took down part of the global
GPS satellite directional systems
and reportedly several major
government call centers, we did not
hear of that first from the EBS or any
other major alert network.
The breaking news, primarily
impacting the AT&T mobility
network, reportedly impacted
several million customers. AT&T
later said 1.5 million customers
were affected, while other industry
experts put the number in excess of
three million, between the outage,
which began at 3 a.m. Eastern time
on Thursday, Feb. 22, and continued
in some places into early Friday.
I do believe in AT&T's more than
occasionally proven incompetence
to not correct or to honestly admit
to service errors and problems. I
do not believe that this problem
was entirely of AT&T's own
making. America led the modern
This is only a test
world in plumbing, wiring, later fiber
optics and satellite transmissions
and still later a variety of wireless
transmission communications
platforms. However, none of
those systems were designed or
developed with espionage, hacking
or protecting vital infrastructure
from bad actors in mind.
Today's AT&T took nearly two
days to fess up to causing its own
outage with a vague statement
about upgrading the security and
performance of its vast network.
During 2003, the largest blackout
in American history impacted 50
million Americans from Maine to
Michigan, lasting several days, and
was eventually blamed on one fallen
tree and a squirrel.
Our way of life, including
the electrical grid, internet, and
our water delivery systems are
as fragile as the next major solar
flare, or a really good hacker, or
perhaps a really rambunctious
squirrel. And along with greater
population density, the vast majority
of our 48 states and Canada are
interconnected. A major outage in
one place overloads other parts of
the network, and whether denied
service or due to system overloads,
those outages cascade.
But imagine that outage
today, and the significantly higher
reliance we place not only on the
devices that run our lives, but the
data and critical documents we
have exclusively placed into the
cloud. Electric utilities in most
states have spent the past few
decades improving grid resilience
and reliability, yet a series of
winter storms a few years ago
took out most of the transmission
grid in Texas, which remains the
only state in the continental U.S.
fully energy independent and not
connected to the grid. In California,
for several years in a row, sparks
from an aging transmission grid
have caused or started several
multi-million-acre forest fires, in
northern and southern parts of the
state. In addition to the resulting
air pollution, property damage and
occasional loss of life, Californians
have endured rolling brownouts and
blackouts to manage the shortfalls
and demand peaks on their
remaining, damaged transmission
grid.
We are not a household of
preppers, but we do maintain a
roughly 30-day supply of bottled
water, rations, and canned goods,
have a couple of freezers and
smaller generators, and I have been
boning up on my scouting survival
skills. I am not trying to alarm or
scare anyone, I just think it is smart
to have a plan with your family and
to have some degree of readiness
for the likelihood that one day,
in the not terribly distant future,
we can expect major nationwide
outages in our grid.
AT&T, in addition to
underplaying the significance of
this outage, which caused real
challenges for millions of families,
not just digital-first Millennials or
Gen Z young adults freaked out by
a world that temporarily did not
include access to their smartphone
or mobile device of choice.
The multi-billion-dollar global
communications giant is offering
impacted customers a $5 bill credit,
to appear across the next two billing
cycles. However, for thousands of
AT&T customers, the inconvenience
was much more significant than
that. The telecom industry and its
share prices live and die by "churn
rate," the acquisition costs of new
customers as well as the number
of customers leaving a specific
carrier each month. For AT&T, this is
really only a test.
Bill Crane is political analyst and
commentator in metro Atlanta, as well
as a columnist for The Champion, DeKalb
Free Press and Georgia Trend. Crane is
a DeKalb native and business owner,
living in Scottdale. You can contact him or
comment on a column at biH.csicrane@
gmail.com.
