The ritual of March Madness is here – and no, we don’t mean basketball tournament blizzards. You’ve meticulously analyzed stats, evaluated talent, predicted upsets, consulted AI, and crafted the perfect bracket.

Even if you’re willing to bet the house on it, filling out a perfect bracket carries odds of 1 in 9 quintillion. It’s an exercise in risk and reward where unpredictability reigns supreme.

While we embrace chaos on the court, there’s one area where unreliability is best left on the bench: our safety on the roads. Trusting your bracket to hold up? Risky. Trusting your seatbelt to hold you in place during a crash? Now, that’s a slam dunk.

It’s not easy to understand why someone would roll the dice and choose to drive or ride in a vehicle without buckling up. In 2023, a staggering 45% of traffic fatalities in Iowa involved individuals who weren’t wearing seatbelts, resulting in 123 lives lost.

Buckling up is your best defense against the unexpected for two key reasons:

Keeping you secure:Buckling up helps avoid a body’s ejection from a vehicle, which is nearly always deadly. Air bags are designed to work with seatbelts: Seatbelts restrain the body, keeping it in the correct position for airbag deployment. This allows airbags to cushion the head and chest, reducing the risk of severe injury.

Watch a powerful reminder of the important role seatbelts play at www.youtube.com/watch?v-pYuqLZxcz3A , and the injuries that typically occur when a body is ejected from a vehicle.

In 2025 in Iowa, 41 people have been killed in traffic crashes. That’s an increase of three since Friday, March 14. In Iowa in 2024, there were 356 traffic-related deaths.

To see statistics published daily by the Office of Driver Services, go to the daily fatality report at https://www. iowadot.gov/mvd/stats/daily.pdf