Back to Index
Vol. 01 Tech Jargon Archive № 01
Tech Jargon · Archive № 01

March Madness Dashboard 2026

A scoreboard and a bracket fused into one page. Every game, every upset, every bust — tracked live as the tournament unfolded.

The Analogy

The war room for three weeks of basketball.

March Madness overwhelms people. Sixty-eight teams, four regions, sixty-seven games in three weeks, and brackets that lose ten percent of their viability in the first hour. Most dashboards drown you in data. The best ones act like a war room — one wall for the bracket, one wall for live scores, and every room connected.

This was that war room, built for the 2026 tournament. Bracket state on one side, live scores on the other, upsets flagged the moment they happened, busts tallied in real time.

The tournament is chaos. The job of the dashboard is to make the chaos legible.
How It Works

Pull. Render. Update.

Input
It pulls the tournament.
Bracket structure, team seeds, game schedule, and live scores — all pulled on a short polling loop during tournament days.
→
Transform
It keeps the state.
Advances winners, flags upsets by seed gap, recalculates bracket pool standings, and surfaces the most-watched games.
→
Output
You see everything, at a glance.
Interactive bracket, live score ticker, upset feed, and stat panels. One page, three weeks of action.
Under the Hood

What was running.

Surface Static Web App Runs in the browser. No login, no backend, no app store — just a URL you could share with the group chat.
Live Data Sports Score Feed Polled live scoreboards during games. Short refresh intervals during the day, paused overnight.
Logic In-Browser State All bracket logic and upset detection ran on the client. Fast, private, and no infrastructure cost.
Home GitHub Pages Free static hosting. Deploys in seconds. Survives a Final Four traffic spike without sweating.
Why it was built this way

A single-use seasonal tool needs to be cheap to run and cheap to ship. A static site with a live data feed hits both: zero cost to host, zero ops burden, and fast enough to update between possessions. The right architecture for a three-week lifespan.

Why It Mattered

Not every project has to live forever.

This was an archive project by design. It served its purpose for the 2026 tournament and then went into the vault. The lesson stayed: build light, ship early, let the tool die when the moment passes.

Some of the best software is the kind that solves one real problem for one real window of time, and then gets out of the way.