Lessons from the Sweet Sixteen

Gentleman. #11 Marquette took out ‘Cuse. The city of Richmond has as many teams in as the ACC. Play-in team VCU knocked off #3 Purdue. This isn’t a commentary on expanding the field or the NCAA Committee’s ability to select and seed. The lesson to be learned here is that the “standard” criteria for identifying an expected “winner” is turning out to be flawed. Big Conference. Average Height. Strength of schedule. All of which might seem like rational selection criteria but miss out on some of the things that have propelled Richmond, Butler and FSU to the Sweet Sixteen: momentum, heart, and an apparently insatiable will-to-win. Ask any true sports fan and they’ll tell you that the big stats of size, conference and FG% are the only way to sort through hundreds of teams and make some choices. However, when it comes to picking that perfect “winner” in a five-on-five battle to select “the One”, that same sports fan will talk about heart and the hot-hand. This is a deep and revealing metaphor for understanding the differences between online dating and matchmaking. The only way to navigate the ocean of half-accurate online profiles is to use the rough-cut criteria needed to sort through large unqualified lists of people. You’ll get results like the NCAA Tournament, with a huge failure rate in expected victories. Online dating is about narrowing choices, using a matchmaker is about picking a winner. At Kelleher International, we have a network of elite singles – a Final Four for each of our clients – and it is our proprietary matching approach and more than twenty-five years of experience that enables us to find “the One” for our clients.