The Beginners Guide to the Month of Madness
With March, Americans not only get the start of spring and warmer weather but, more importantly, the start of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament, more commonly known as March Madness. This piece will serve as a guide for anyone looking to learn more about this month-long tournament that will narrow the field down from 68 teams to one champion.
The men's tournament began in 1939, and the first iteration of the tournament only had eight collegiate teams, while the women's tournament began in 1982 with 32 teams. However, the tournament that viewers know and love today began later. In 1985, the NCAA expanded the tournament in order to include more teams, therefore building their fanbase and bringing in more profit. The same change was made on the women’s side in 1994. This new tournament pits the best 68 teams of the previous collegiate season in a one-game win-or-go-home tournament-style bracket. Given that there are over 350 Division One college basketball teams, this tournament is notoriously large, and there is a selection committee that whittles them down.
The First Four is an interesting wrinkle that's been added to the tournament as of 2011. This is slightly confusing for the new fan, so to simplify it, eight teams compete in play-in games, with the four winners going into the main tournament.
Qualification for the tournament has two paths. The first and most straightforward way is for a team to win its conference tournament. A conference is essentially a grouping of 8 to 16 teams that are usually in one local area. For example, there is a conference called the West Coast Conference (WCC), which, as its name suggests, is populated mainly by teams on the West Coast. There are 32 of these conferences, and the teams in them play their regular-season games against each other in preparation for the tournament. Each conference tournament has its own variations for qualification from its member teams, but they all serve the same purpose: to determine one sole winner who will automatically be qualified for March Madness to represent the conference as its champion.
That is how 32 of the 68 teams are decided, however, deciding the other 36 is where it gets even more difficult. The second path to qualify for March Madness is what is called an at-large bid. Essentially, a committee that is composed of various college athletic directors and conference commissioners was created solely to adjudicate and judge teams, ranking what they see as the 36 best teams in the country that did not win their conference tournament. So, while the selection process doesn’t have any set criteria, the important things a team needs are a good record in the regular season, wins over teams that are also very good, and avoiding losses against bad teams. This isn’t to say the committee always picks these teams perfectly, as every year there is a ton of controversy over the picks. Once the committee selects the 36 teams, the field is set, and the madness can begin.
The committee will seed teams from 1 to 16 spread out over four regional areas: East, South, West, and Midwest. A one seed will play a 16 seed, a two seed will play a 15 seed, and so on. Teams will compete in a round of 64, a round of 32, a sweet 16, an elite eight, the final four, and the national championship. The alliterative names have become a fun component in the naming of the tournament. The beauty of the tournament lies in the one-game win-or-go-home style that allows for anything to happen. For example, in 2022, 15-seed Saint Peters was able to make it all the way to the elite eight teams. While some would assume the final four to be the four one-seeds constantly, that's only ever happened once in the history of the tournament, showcasing its unpredictability.
"It's hard to win in March. Those teams are really good, too, but you have to get a little luck and get the right matchups and have to be playing your best,” said San Diego State University Head Coach Brian Dutcher in his postgame press conference after his team's National Championship loss last year against the University of Connecticut.
So, each team has the same opportunity and the same goal: win six straight games and become national champions, which is easier said than done. Despite all the chaos that happens in this tournament, the one constant is that madness will ensue over the next month. Cinderella stories will be told, giants will be slain, game winners will be made, and one team will cement itself in the history books as national champions.
The Story of the ‘Almost’ Perfect Bracket
There are 63 total games in March Madness. Predicting the outcomes of these games has become a bigger deal for some than the actual tournament, and every year people constantly predict dozens of these games incorrectly. In 2019, Gregg Nigl filled out one of the millions of brackets with dumb hope. However, his bracket was different from the others. Nigl’s bracket would correctly predict the first 49 games of the tournament, shattering the previous record of 39. Some might assume he was a college basketball messiah, but Nigl was just an average fan who randomly made this bracket an hour before the tournament while delirious on cold medicine. Nigl’s story is the perfect example of the randomness of March Madness and how anything can happen with a little dumb luck.
The Story of the Little Dog That Could
While March is full of upsets and unpredictability, there has always remained one constant: one-seeds beating 16-seeds. In fact, as of 2018, 16-seeds were 0-135 all-time in the tournament against one-seeds. This means those four games were as close as the tournament could get to a guarantee. The 2018 bracket was revealed, and the one-seed Virginia Cavaliers were slated to play the 16-seed University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Retrievers. Going into their matchup, Virginia was favored to win this game by 20.5 points, was the overall one-seed in the tournament, had only lost two games all year, and was the second betting favorite to win the tournament. However, the little Retrievers from UMBC didn’t seem to care about any of this and came to play. UMBC ended up shocking the world by beating Virginia by 20 points and, in turn, becoming the first ever 16-seed to beat a one-seed. The 0-135 streak was broken, and despite losing in the next round, the Retrievers would go down in history with the biggest upset in college basketball history.
The women's bracket to go all the way
As of March 26, there are four women's brackets that have correctly selected the winners of the first 48 games of the tournament. This means they correctly predicted the results of the entire round of 64 and the round of 32. Collectively, they currently hold the women's record and are only 2 games away from breaking the overall record of 49. They are each 15 games away from becoming the first-ever bracket, male or female, to achieve perfection.
