You can thank the internet for crossing the bracket tipping point.

This time of year, during the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, just about everyone has some inane idea for a bracket. The concept is simple: Start with a square number and reduce in half. Then in half. Then in half, until there's one left standing. It's an easy, mindless way to decide the best of something.

There are beer brackets and food brackets. Vote in a bracket to determine the coolest "Star Wars" character, or the best "Saturday Night Live" cast member, or America's ugliest accent. The novelty bracket has exploded recently, aligned with the height of internet content creation driven by the need for pageviews. It works well alongside March Madness, as we watch for three weekends as college teams are ousted in a competition not unlike "The Hunger Games." It's so successful that numerous college basketball postseason elimination tournaments, like the CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament and College Basketball Invitational, have launched in the last 10 years. 

In short, we're bracket-mad, if you'd like to stay with the theme. 

It's amazing that college basketball's postseason-tournament structure has only grown in popularity while sport seems to be embracing nuance. The emergence of advanced metrics has revealed that small sample sizes aren't necessarily good indicators of true success, meaning one-and-done elimination events never completely tell the story of a sport's season. 

It's actually gone backwards in college football, where a mathematically based system to determine the sport's championship game has been altered to instead determine entrants in a March Madness-like tournament. There are obvious reasons why college football would want to do this (money, money, also money), but given our greater understanding of between-the-lines data, allowing one-off random 60- or 40-minute games to determine the outcome of the season seems at least partially arbitrary. 

But college basketball and football are perfect examples to show America's intense romance with elimination. March Madness simplifies the marathon of crowded college basketball by starting with 64 pseudo winners, and knocking one off until one remains. College football's playoff system allows for one true winner in a field of maybes, while the lesser gods fight in chosen bowl games.

As a result, March Madness saw its highest first-weekend ratings ever this year. College football's championship saw an 18.5 rating; meanwhile, Major League Baseball's slower and nuanced World Series received an 8.2 average rating (its highest rating, the elimination Game 7, was 13.7). Oh, and the elimination game to beat them all? Well, the Super Bowl, of course - television's most-watched program.

The elimination game is easy to get behind because it's easy. There are two sides. You can call one good and one evil. There's one event, and just one event, and in the end one team will win, one team will lose. There's no grand strategy. Everyone plays and leaves it all on the field, or court. It's black and white. It's simple.

We're bracket-mad because brackets are black and white. There are no nuances to navigate. You won't have to think hard about anything. That's just the way we like it.