3 Most Ridiculous March Madness Commercials
Basketball is under-appreciated for being a game of über-precise physics. Crossover dribbling, bank shots, finger rolls, and watching nine consecutive hours of televised NCAA gameplay in March: These are just a few of the amazingly scientific happenstances of the game.
Unfortunately, while watching the first three rounds of the NCAA tournament last week, it became repetitively clear that big-shot companies and their big-shot ad agencies don't share the respect I possess for the nuanced physics of hoops.
Shame on them.
1. Buffalo Wild Wings Slo-Mo
Let's establish one thing from the jump: Time is relative (h/t Albert Einstein), so, theoretically speaking, manipulating motion in such a way as to slow down the perception of time in the midst of movement is actually plausible. The waitress here, who no doubt works at BWW only as a means-to-end approach while she studies quantum physics at MIT, is perhaps on to something.
If these gentlemen want the tournament to "last" longer, then her slow-motion wish-granting attempt is a) highly cerebral and applicable to her field and b) excellent waitressing on her part. She deserves a hefty tip.
Alas, her execution is flawed. When manipulating the perception of time, one cannot simultaneously tinker with space-time in location A (the basketball arena) in the exact same manner as location B (BWW). Forcing both space-times to perceptibly slow down at the exact same clip is like the tortoise calling its tortoise clone "slow." The inherent relationship between the two space-times remains proportional. Therefore, the feeling of elapsed time also logically remains the same, and those two b-ball fans will perceive the "length" of a basketball game as usual.
2. Bud Light Blind Dating
They're on a blind date and drinking Bud Light, yet they're ping-ponging clever banter with palpable chemistry.
This does not add up in the real world: blind date + Bud Light ≠ chemistry.
In the real world — of science — the formula looks more like this: blind date + Bud Light = a failed experiment in lowering expectations.
3. Charles Barkley's Capitol One Underwear
According to Wikipedia, Charles Barkley is 6'6" tall and tips the scale at 252 pounds. The piece of underwear serving as a humiliation agent in this commercial with Alec Baldwin is far too large for him. And this is a man who was affectionately known as the "round mound of rebound" during his NBA playing days.
Even factoring in his playing weight of 300-plus pounds, Sir Charles would drown in those tighty-whiteys. Based on precise tele-dimensional calculations, the undergarment in that ad would be snug on a stocky human in the neighborhood of 6'1" and 479 pounds.
Moreover, Charles Barkley is 50 years old, earns a pretty good paycheck, and exhibits a public personality that oozes fierce independence. He definitely does not live with his mother. I'm convinced of this.
And don't even get me started on Baldwin's preposterous underwear-as-boat-sail idea.
As the Sweet 16 tips off this week, I hope to see science, reason, and loyalty to the laws of physics return to basketball coverage. I mean, we're watching students of higher education after all.
