March Madness - NCAA college basketball - NCAA Men's basketball

MarchMadness 2009

Disambiguation: "March Madness comes from the phrase 'Mad as a March Hare'. In England, the phrase March Madness may refer to wasteful spending at the end of a budget year. The rest of this article covers the use of the term in reference to the NCAA basketball tournament, also known as the Road to the Final Four.

March Madness is a popular term for season-ending basketball tournaments played in March (Brent Musburger is generally regarded as the individual who first used that phrase in conjunction with the college tournament, using it during CBS Sports' coverage of the tourney back in 1982 - see below), especially those conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and various state high school associations. The phrase was not associated with the college tournament in 1939, when an Illinois official wrote "A little March Madness [may] contribute 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. March Madness or Big Dance refers to the frenzy these tournaments ignite among sports fans and, at least at the college level, sports gamblers. As it applies to college basketball, the term originally referred to the conference basketball tournaments, which occur in March just before the NCAA tournament begins, but in recent years has been used to refer to the NCAA tournament itself (the first weekend of which involves some 49 games, and which actually runs into early April). The term is now used in reference to both the men's and women's tournaments.



Brackets and picks

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 the tournaments. The 65 (including the 2 teams who compete in the play-in game) participating teams are announced by the selection committee on Selection Sunday, although some teams are known to have made it already by winning their conference tournament (See: At-large bid, Automatic bid). The teams are seeded from 1 to 16 in 4 regional groupings around the country. The eventual winners of the four regions then meet at the Final Four in a predetermined location. The four seeds play out the tournament through single eliminaton until a National Champion is crowned. As a tournament ritual, the winning team cuts down the net at the end of the regional championship game. Each player cuts a single strand off of the net for themselves, commemorating their victory. Many people fill out tournament brackets in office pools. Entrance fees and legality of the pools themselves vary. Whoever accumulates the most points by accurately predicting the outcomes of the games wins the grand prize, most often pooled from the entrance fees. Points are assessed in different ways; one example is given below:

  • First round: 2 point per winning team.
  • Second round: 4 points per winning team.
  • Third round: 8 points per winning team.
  • Fourth round: 16 points per winning team.
  • Fifth round: 32 points per winning team.
  • Sixth round: 64 points for predicting National Champion.


    • The point total steadily increases by round in order to reward those players who correctly picked teams that would go further in the tournament.

    If at the end of the tournament two players have the same point total, a tie is often broken by the total number of total points scored in the Championship Game.

    History of the term

    H. V. Porter, an official with the Illinois High School Association (and later a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame) was the first person to use March Madness to commemorate a basketball tournament. A gifted writer, Porter published an essay named March Madness in 1939 and in 1942 used the phrase in a poem, Basketball Ides of March. Through the years the use of March Madness picked up steam, especially in Illinois and other parts of the Midwest. During this period the term was used almost exclusively in reference to state high school tournaments. In 1977, the IHSA published a book about its tournament titled March Madness.

    Fans began connecting the term to the NCAA tournament in the early 1980s. Evidence suggests that CBS sportscaster Brent Musburger, who had worked for many years in Chicago prior to joining CBS, popularized the term during the annual tournament broadcasts.

    Only in the 1990s did either the IHSA or NCAA think about trademarking the term, and by that time a small television production company named Intersport, Inc., had beaten them both to the punch. IHSA eventually bought the trademark rights from Intersport and then went after big game, suing GTE Vantage, Inc., an NCAA licensee that used the name March Madness for a computer game based on the college tournament. In an historic ruling, Illinois High School Association v. GTE Vantage, Inc. (1996), the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit created the concept of a "dual-use trademark", granting both the IHSA and NCAA the right to trademark the term for their own purposes.

    Following the ruling, the NCAA and IHSA joined forces and created the March Madness Athletic Association to coordinate the licensing of the trademark and investigate possible trademark infringement. One such case involved a company that had obtained the Internet domain name marchmadness.com and was using it to post information about the NCAA tournament. After protracted litigation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in March Madness Athletic Association v. Netfire, Inc. (2003) that March Madness was not a generic term and ordered Netfire to relinquish the domain name.
    Championship
    The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship is a single elimination tournament held each spring featuring 65 college basketball teams in the United States. Colloquially known as March Madness or the Big Dance, the tournament takes place over 3 weeks at sites across the U.S., and the national semifinals (the Final Four) have become one of the nation's most prominent sports events. Since its 1939 inception, it has built a legacy that includes dynasty teams and dramatic underdog stories. In recent years, friendly wagering on the event has become something of a national pastime, spawning countless "office pools" that attract expert fans and novices alike. All games of the tournament are broadcast on the CBS broadcast television network in the United States, except for the Opening Round game (or "play-in game" as it has been called), which aired on TNN in 2001, and ESPN since 2002.
    The tournament 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 seedings are based on several factors, including team rankings, win-loss records and RPI data.
    The two lowest-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) play a pre-tournament game to determine which will advance into the first round of the tournament, with the winner advancing to play the top seed in one of the four regions. This play-in game was added in 2001 and has been played in University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year.
    A Most Outstanding Player honor is awarded by the Associated Press at the end of each tournament.
    Tournament format
    A total of 65 teams qualify for the tournament played in March and April. 30 of the 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 an automatic bid. The remaining teams are granted "at-large" bids, which are extended by the NCAA Selection Committee. The tournament is split into four regions and each region has teams seeded 1–16, with the committee making every region as comparable to the others as possible. The best team in each region plays the #16 team, the #2 team plays the #15, and so on. Two teams play a play-in game game on the Tuesday preceding the first weekend of the tournament, with the winner of that game advancing to the main draw of the tournament and plays a top seed in one of the regionals. This game has been played at the University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio since its inception in 2001. These two teams share equally in the share of funds as if they had qualified for a first round game, and wins in the opening round game are considered wins in the NCAA tournament. Thus, properly, the tournament has 65 teams, although in practice most brackets only include the 63 teams, with one spot blank (to be filled in after the play-in game). Since no #16 seed has ever beaten a #1 seed in the men's championship, the result of the opening round game is largely deemed irrelevant for bracket-filling purposes. Since 2002, the tournament has used the so-called "pod" system, in which the eight first- and second-round sites are distributed around the four regionals. Before the 2002 tournament, all teams playing at a first- or second-round site fed into the same regional tournament. The pod system was designed to limit the early-round travel of as many teams as possible. In the pod system, each regional bracket is divided into four-team "pods". The possible pods by seeding are:
  • Pod #1: 1v16, 8v9
  • Pod #2: 2v15, 7v10
  • Pod #3: 3v14, 6v11
  • Pod #4: 4v13, 5v12


    • Each of the eight first- and second-round sites is assigned two pods, where each group of four teams play each other. A host site's pods may be from different regions, and thus the winners of each pod would advance into separate regional tournaments.

    The first- and second-round games are played on the first weekend of the tournament, either on Thursday and Saturday or Friday and Sunday. The teams which are still alive after the first weekend advance to the regional semi-finals (the Sweet Sixteen) and finals (the Elite Eight) played on the second weekend of the tournament (again, the games are split into Thursday/Saturday and Friday/Sunday).

    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. Before the 2004 tournament, the pairings for the semifinals were based on an annual rotation. For example, in 2000, the winner of the West Regional played the winner of the Midwest regional, and the South winner played the East winner; in 2001, the West winner played the East winner and the South played the Midwest; in 2002, the West played the South and the East played the Midwest. Since 2004 and in response to complaints that too often the two best teams remaining squared off in a semifinal game and not in the final game (such as when the last two remaining 1 seeds, Kansas and Maryland, played in one semifinal while a 2 seed and a 5 seed played in the other semifinal), the pairings are determined by the ranking of the four top seeds against each other. The four number one seeds are ranked before the tournament begins: in 2006, Duke was the overall #1 seed, followed by Connecticut, Villanova and Memphis. Which regional winner is to face which other regional winner is determined based on this ranking. Had all of the #1 seeds reached the Final Four, Duke (from the South) would have played Memphis (from the West) and Connecticut (from the East) would have played Villanova (from the Midwest). As it happened, none of the #1 seeds made the Final Four in 2006, but the South winner (LSU) still played the West winner (UCLA) in a #2/#4 matchup, while the East (George Mason) played the Midwest (Florida) in a #11/#3 matchup.

    The brackets are not reseeded after each round. The tournament is single-elimination and there are no consolation games—although there was a third-place game as late as 1981, and each regional had a third-place game through the 1975 tournament. The single-elimination format produces opportunities for Cinderella teams to advance despite playing much tougher teams. Meanwhile, despite the numerous instances of early-round Tournament upsets, including four instances of a #15 seed defeating a #2 seed, no #1 seed has ever lost in the first round to a #16 seed. The closest call came in 1989 when Georgetown University defeated Princeton University 50–49 and the University of Oklahoma beat East Tennessee State 72–71,and in 1990 when Michigan State had to go to overtime to beat Murray State 75-71.

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