The biggest sports event online is not the Super Bowl, which peaked at #5 this year on the Lycos 50. No, the biggest sports event online is the NCAA Basketball Tournament, a.k.a. March Madness, which debuts at #1 this week after peaking at #2 last year.
Like last year, tourney searches concentrated on brackets, picks, and pools. Everyone from your boss to your mom to you seems to have filled out a bracket, taking a shot in the dark that the school where your cousin's roommate's girlfriend took a class once can actually make it to the Sweet 16. If that school is Gonzaga, you are actually in luck.
Of course, the huge number of searches for the NCAA tournament isn't that shocking. No, what's shocking is the huge number of searches for the National Invitation Tournament, the NIT (#32). Who would have expected this much interest in games between teams that were too mediocre to make it into the big dance? Are we as a nation this desperate for something to bet on?
It will be interesting to see what happens to the NCAA tournament searches over the next couple of weeks. Historically, because of the popularity of office pools, college basketball exhibits a very strange tendency: it is the only sport to get less popular as its championship grows near. As 64 teams become 16 teams and then four teams, less fans are interested because by the final round most office pools are decided based on earlier games, and most fans of specific teams have seen their teams fall out of the running.
As far as which teams are most popular online, Duke basketball gets more than twice as many searches as the next team, Iowa. Kentucky, North Carolina, and upset specialist Gonzaga round out the top five.
One more note: March Madness reads last rites to the XFL, which falls out of the Lycos 50 this week. The TV ratings for this weekend's games, which went head-to-head with the NCAA tournament, were the lowest in the history of network television. RIP, He Hate Me.
KUCHA CONFUSION: The gradual, somewhat predictable knockoff of the Kuchas hasn't dimmed the popularity of Survivor (#14). But some confusion now reigns on the net, thanks to the newest single from the R&B trio Destiny's Child (#41), also called "Survivor," from their upcoming album, also called Survivor (for maximum confusion).
Back in December, we noted that Destiny's Child were one of the most popular search terms that had never made the Lycos 50, but that is no longer true. They are the first girl group to make the list, and the second band to make its Lycos 50 debut on the list in the past three weeks (the other, the Dave Matthews Band, falls off this week).
Meanwhile, Big Brother (#43) returns to the Lycos 50 this week. What, you say? It isn't even on anymore? Yes, that's true in America, but in England (where the show was always more popular than in the U.S.) a number of celebrities recently completed a week of Celebrity Big Brother, with proceeds going to the charity Comic Relief. It's another example of the growing number of non-U.S. searchers on the Lycos Network.
ALL MOD CONS: Half-Life Counter-Strike (#12) shoots up the Lycos 50, as a brand new update was released last week for this popular computer game mod. A mod is downloadable code, which will modify a popular computer game to a new setting while keeping the basic rules intact. Counter-Strike changes the first-person science fiction action shooter Half-Life into a much more realistic combat simulation with weaponry straight from news headlines, and it is much more popular than the original game.
CLASSICS RETURN: Two classic Lycos 50 topics came very close to returning this week. Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt hasn't made the list since April, but she finishes #56 thanks to interest in her new movie Heartbreakers. Rapper Tupac Shakur, who has been absent since June, finishes at #54 thanks to yet another posthumous album of archived material, Until the End of Time, which will be released next week.
Tupac rivals only Jimi Hendrix when it comes to posthumous music releases. At this point, they could probably release a CD of Tupac playing a tree in the second-grade play, toss some tired G-funk beats around it, and sell a million copies.
SHORT SUBJECTS: Interest in the Santana High School shooting fades, but interest in Foot and Mouth Disease (#24) grows? The Holocaust (#35) is the latest twentieth-century study subject to arrive on the Lycos 50 thanks to student interest? Spring Break isn't receiving as many searches this year as it did last year, and it has yet to hit the Lycos 50? Janet Jackson is on the rise, just missing the Lycos 50 at #57.
NEW THIS WEEK: NCAA Basketball, Half-Life Counter Strike, the NIT, the census, the Holocaust, Destiny's Child, Digimon, computer game Diablo II, Madonna.
DROPOUTS: Santana High School shooting, Dale Earnhardt autopsy, Oprah Winfrey, Dave Matthews Band, science fair projects (likely gone until August or September), IT/Ginger, Christina Aguilera, Mardi Gras, XFL, Metallica.
BIGGEST RISE: St. Patrick's Day, up 18 places to #4.
BIGGEST DROP: Dale Earnhardt, down 16 places to #21.
ONE YEAR AGO: Skateboarding debuts at #31 on the list, and it hasn't been out of the Lycos 50 since.
BLOWING OUR OWN HORN: Back in January we picked the rap-rock band Crazy Town as "One to Watch." This week, their song "Butterfly" is number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.
TOMORROW: The controversy heating up America's campuses.
