How the NCAA Basketball Tournament's March Madness Destroys Smartphones

Kind of a cute problem to have - as long as we're not counting on them to respond to a nuclear attack. JL

Ben Cohen reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The NCAA tournament is where college basketball’s legends are born—and where their phones die. Their phones often can’t keep up with the attention.A flood of messages and alerts can overload even the newest smartphones and cause them to freeze up.The technological paralysis was more prevalent than ever this year with a record 10 upsets involving double-digit seeds in the first round of the tournament.

It was 11 a.m. on the day of Arkansas-Little Rock’s first game in the NCAA tournament when Chris Beard disconnected from the outside world by turning off his phone. It was 8 p.m. when the coach turned his phone back on and discovered that the entire outside world was trying to get in touch with him.
What happened in between was that No. 12-seeded Little Rock had pulled off an improbable upset of No. 5 Purdue in double overtime after a series of increasingly audacious shots that made Beard’s team the darling of the Big Dance—at least for a day. Beard suddenly had hundreds of people reaching out to him at almost exactly the same time. There was just one problem: He couldn’t respond to any of them.
“My phone had completely blown up,” he said. “I mean, like, just destroyed.”
The NCAA tournament is where college basketball’s legends are born—and where their phones die. The tournament makes people very famous, very fast for a very short amount of time. Their phones often can’t keep up with the attention.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but a representative for Best Buy’s technical support division, Geek Squad, said a flood of messages and alerts can overload even the newest smartphones and cause them to freeze up.The technological paralysis was more prevalent than ever this year with a record 10 upsets involving double-digit seeds in the first round of the tournament. Many of the players and coaches on those teams were essentially anonymous when they woke up. Then, at the exact moment that more people than ever wanted to contact them, they found their phones were nothing more than fancy paperweights.

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After his team’s upset win, Beard checked his phone and noticed something unusual. He didn’t have any texts or calls.
“I have no idea who contacted me,” he said. “So if any of my friends or recruits are out there: I’m not getting a big head; I’m not turning into somebody else. My phone’s not working. But I hope that you’ll text me again so I can thank you.”

Arkansas-Little Rock coach Chris Beard said his phone stopped working after his team’s upset win over Purdue in the opening round. Photo: Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

For basketball players in college and the NBA, what makes this even worse is that their phones are more important than certain body parts. (Wisdom teeth, for example, still can’t Snapchat.) Every postgame locker room scene looks more or less the same: tall men in sweats staring at their phones. But that becomes all but impossible after a crazy NCAA tournament outcome because of all the messages coming their way. It’s like dipping into a plunge pool only to be swept away by a tsunami.
“Our phones were buzzing non-stop,” said Middle Tennessee State guard Jaqawn Raymond after his team’s monumental upset of No. 2 seed Michigan State.
This doesn’t happen in the NBA. It doesn’t even happen to others in the NCAA tournament. Players on top-seeded teams are used to being on national television, and Duke or North Carolina winning in the first round doesn’t warrant the same response as a half-court bank shot from Northern Iowa.
So the stars of smaller schools return to their locker room and soon learn that their phones are almost unusable. Yale forward Justin Sears’s phone showed nearly 300 texts after the first NCAA tournament win in school history. Yale coach James Jones had more, and Middle Tennessee’s players had even more. They reported 500 text messages—which is a lot even for teenagers.
Most of them were congratulatory. But some were from people who were rooting against them. They had picked Michigan State to win the national championship. “A lot of people were mad,” said Reggie Upshaw Jr. “We messed everybody’s bracket up.”

Middle Tennessee's Reggie Upshaw Jr., left, was inundated with text messages after Middle Tennessee’s upset of Michigan State. Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

It didn’t used to be this way. Only recently have smart phones and social media turned March’s stars into basketball’s version of viral phenomena. And few people on the planet know the feeling of NCAA tournament fame like Ali Farokhmanesh.
Farokhmanesh, the former Northern Iowa guard whose dagger that eliminated No. 1 seed Kansas in 2010 will be shown every March for the rest of time, wasn’t on Twitter back then. But his phone’s battery still died faster than ever before. He had so many Facebook FB 0.45 % friend requests in such a short space of time that he actually exceeded the site’s limit. “So you couldn’t ask to be my friend anymore,” he said.
Then there were the text messages. It turns out hitting one of the most iconic shots in the history of college basketball is all it takes to hear from people who you haven’t spoken with in years. “Even people I didn’t really like,” he said. Farokhmanesh tried to respond to everyone who texted, but it was impossible to type back when his phone was shaking. “My mom and my girlfriend at the time got mad at me,” he said, “because I didn’t respond to their text messages right away.”
A new wave of mania came when Sports Illustrated put him on the cover of its magazine the next week, and it eventually interfered with the one activity that other celebrities don’t have to deal with: class. “I had to turn my phone off completely at some point,” said Farokhmanesh, now a graduate assistant coach at Nebraska, “because every second there was a vibration.”Farokhmanesh actually had it easier than other players. His shot came in the second round, so he had almost a week before his next game, instead of the one day off between first- and second-round games and between the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight this week.
For some reason, though, the NCAA tournament doesn’t allow the proper time for players to respond to their hundreds of text messages, which can be distracting as teams try to prepare for their next opponent. New York Knicks forward Kyle O’Quinn, a key player on the No. 15-seeded Norfolk State team that beat Missouri in 2012, admitted then that he was up later than usual that night and earlier than usual the next morning.
“It was tough going to bed, but when I fell asleep I was out cold,” he said. “Text messages woke me up.”
It turns out this type of phone trouble is a good problem. Underdogs can use their phones normally again as soon as their run at the tournament comes to an end.
Or at least that’s usually the case. Little Rock lost in the second round Saturday, but Beard’s phone is still on the fritz, said a representative for the coach. He’s working with his network carrier to recover any texts he might have missed.