March Madness

The 20-day tournament, also known as March Madness, the Big Dance or the Final Four, has become one of the United States’ most prominent sports events.

The tournament, whose field includes regional conference champions and other top teams, is staged in a single elimination format. Since its 1939 inception, it has built a legacy that includes a dynasty of teams and dramatic underdog stories. In recent years, friendly wagering on March Madness has become something of a national pastime, spawning countless office pools that attract expert fans and novices alike. All games of March Madness are broadcasted on CBS except for the opening round game, called the play-in game, which is aired on ESPN.

The March Madness bracket is made up of champions from each Division I conference, which receive automatic bids. The remaining slots are at-large berths, with teams chosen by an NCAA selection committee. The selection process and tournament seeds are based on several factors, including team rankings, win-loss records and RPI date. The two lowest-seeded teams play a pre-tournament game to determine which will advance to the first round of March Madness.

March Madness is a popular term for season-ending basketball tournaments played in March. The phrase was not associated with the college tournament in 1939, when an Illinois official wrote “A little March Madness contributes to sanity.” March Madness is also a registered trademark, held jointly by the NCAA and the Illinois High School Association. The trademark has sparked a pair of high profile courtroom battles in recent years.

A total of 65 teams qualify for March Madness which is played in March and April every year. 30 teams earn automatic bids by winning their respective conference tournaments. Because the Ivy League does not conduct a postseason tournament, its regular season conference champion receives the bid. The remaining teams are granted at-large bids, which are extended by the NCAA Selection Committee.

March Madness is split into four regions and each region has teams seeded 1-16, with the committee making every region comparable to the others in terms of talent. The best team in each region plays the number 16 seeded team; the 2nd seed plays the 15th and so on.

The first and second round games are played on the first weekend of March Madness. The teams which are still alive after the first weekend advance to the regional semi-finals, called the Sweet Sixteen. Then the winners advance to the finals, called the Elite Eight, played on the second weekend of the tournament.

The winners of each region advance to the Final Four, where the national semifinals are played on Saturday and the national championship is played on Monday. The brackets are not reseeded after each round. March Madness is single-elimination and there are no consolation games, although there is a third place game in the Final Four.

In March Madness, all sites are nominally neutral. The teams are prohibited from playing tournament games on their home courts. Under NCAA rules, any court on which a team hosts more than three regular season games is considered a home court.

During March Madness, many people enjoy predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournaments. Bracketology is the art of picking the correct teams that will be in tournaments. The 65 participating teams are announced by the selection committee on Selection Sunday. The teams are seeded from 1 to 16 in 4 regional groupings around the country. The eventual winners of the four regions meet in the Final Four in a predetermined location. The four seeds play out the tournament until the National Champion if crowned.

Some claim that the phrase Final Four was first used to describe the final games of Indiana’s annual high school basketball tournament. But the NCAA, which has a trademark on the term, says Final Four was originated by a Cleveland Plain Dealer sportswriter, Ed Chay, in a 1975 article that appeared in the Official Collegiate Basketball Guide. The article stated that Marquette University was “one of the final four” in the 1974 tournament. The NCAA started capitalizing the term in 1978.

Television has been integral to the success of March Madness. The first broadcast was in 1946. Regional television broadcasts began in 1952, and the championship game was televised nationally for the first time in 1954. In 1969, the championship game was broadcast on network television for the first time on NBC. NBC also televised selected regional games, with first TVS Television Network and later NCAA Productions, the in house production arm of the NCAA, broadcasting first and second round games to the markets where the universities are from. In 1980 ESPN began showing the opening rounds of March Madness, which established ESPN’s following among college basketball fans and was the network’s first contract signed with the NCAA for a major sport.

In 1999, DirecTV began broadcasting all games otherwise not shown on local television with its Mega March Madness premium package. Prior to that, all games were available on C-Band satellite and were picked up by sports bars. In 2003, CBS struck a deal with Yahoo to offer live streaming of the first 3 rounds of games under its Yahoo Platinum service. In 2004, CBS sold access to March Madness on Demand which provided games not otherwise shown on broadcast television. In 2005, the service offered enhanced coverage of pre-game and post-game interviews and press conference. In 2006 it dropped the coverage of interviews and press conferences. The service was profitable and set a record for simultaneous online streams at 268,000.

Kentucky 46

North Carolina 37

UCLA 36

Kansas 34

Indiana 32

Louisville 31

UCLA 11

Kentucky 7

Indiana 5

North Carolina 4

Duke 3