Larry David Refuses to Fill Out A March Madness Bracket

Surprise, surprise — Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David hasn’t filled out a March Madness bracket this year. “This tournament,” he groaned this week on The Rich Eisen Show. “How much can I follow in sports? I'm supposed to know who's on Drake? This is crazy! Valparaiso? I know names on Valparaiso? This is insane!” 

Wake up David in a couple of weeks when things get more interesting. “Maybe I'll watch the semifinal but that's it,” he vowed. “What can I do? I've got the Rangers, I've got the Knicks. I can't follow all these teams! How do people do it? Who are they married to?”

Since David doesn’t follow college hoops, Eisen wondered if he knew about Long Beach State coach Dan Monson. Monson was fired before the Big West Tournament, but his team won the whole thing, sending the canned coach to the Big Dance. At a press conference, Monson compared himself to George Costanza, a guy who tried to get fired from the Yankees but couldn’t. “That's me,” he sighed. “I’m a Seinfeld episode going on right now in real life.” 

It reminded David of the time he quit Saturday Night Live and then showed up for work on Monday like it never happened. “You didn’t think for a split-second that was a crazy idea back in the day?” asked Eisen. Au contraire, David replied. “I thought it was a great idea. I thought I had nothing to lose.” And it worked, sort of — David kept the job but SNL kept cutting his sketches.

While they were on the subject of sports, David returned to an old idea for improving football. With the UFL, a new professional football league, starting up soon, David renewed his call to remove goalposts from the game. “I’m still obsessed with it,” he ranted. “Suppose there was a baseball game and there were two parallel bars in deep center field that were 12 feet apart and you could get a guy off the bench to hit a fungo. And if he got it through the bars, you get a run. I mean, what's the point? It has nothing to do with the game!” 

So David had his agent arrange a phone call with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who owns a team in the new league. “I pitched him my ‘no goalpost’ idea and I thought it was going to happen! He was completely into it.” But it turns out that the UFL had already adopted a rule from the old XFL that accomplishes David’s goal — rather than a kick, teams run or pass the ball from a couple of yards out to earn extra points.

Could David’s call have made an actual impact on the new league? Eisen argues yes. “Maybe,” he offered, “(Johnson) was on the fence, you spoke and he's like, ‘You know, Larry makes a lot of sense.’”

“Rich, I got to tell you,” David replied. “If there's one thing I could accomplish in my life, if I could get rid of these goalposts, I will die a happy man. That would give me more pleasure than anything.”