Even if you’re not a fan of college basketball, you’ve likely heard the term “March Madness.” Each year beginning in March for four weeks, the National College Athletics Association (NCAA) holds men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to determine the national champions of college basketball, and these tournaments are nicknamed “March Madness.” .
The NCAA tournament officially begins with the announcement of the group, which are the rankings and the first matches of the teams that have earned the opportunity to play in the tournament. The group also features which teams will play in which locations across the country for their tournament games.
These pools become a national obsession for basketball fans, with people participating in contests trying to guess the outcome of each game in the pool, ending with the overall national champion and a tiebreaker score prediction.
Many companies, websites, and friend groups run contests that people can enter for free or for a fee to compete against their friends or complete strangers to see who can get the most points with their bracket predictions. The prizes for winning these contests range from bragging rights to cash or merchandise.
The NCAA tournament is known for its great surprises. Because the teams in this tournament are matched up against teams from different conferences that they would not normally play with, the outcome of any game can be very unpredictable. The way teams are paired in the first round tends to favor the higher rated teams, for example a team ranked number one plays against a team ranked number sixteen, however surprises are not uncommon in the first round. and second rounds of the tournament. This makes matchups fun and difficult to predict, and is part of the reason the tournament is nicknamed “March Madness.”
Party invitation
Thirty-one NCAA men’s basketball teams receive automatic invitations to play in the NCAA tournament because they won their respective conferences. Another 37 teams are chosen through a selection committee based on their conference record, road record, ranking in national polls, wins against ranked opponents, and RPI (Rating Percentage Index).
This selection committee also decides what classification each team will get, called a seed, and in which of the four regions each team will be located. Each region contains between 16 and 18 teams, with the highest ranked team in each region earning a number one seed. A lower seed that makes headway in the tournament is called a “Cinderella” team.
The last few years have added four additional teams to the original 64 teams that used to understand the tournament. These four extras play in the opening round to earn a chance to officially play in the tournament. Once the 64 tournament teams are officially decided, the actual tournament begins.
The tournament
The NCAA tournament generally begins on the third Thursday in March with two full days of intense games that shrink the field from 64 teams to 32. The next two days are played games that shrink the field back to just 16 teams, often referred to as the “Sweet 16.” Games resume the following Thursday, the second week of the tournament, where the field is reduced to Final Four teams. The following, third week of the tournament, it features the four teams that were left running for the National Championship. Although Final Four games are played on the first Saturday in April, they are still an important part of March Madness. The National Championship game is played the following Monday.
