Articles

Going Crazy with March Madness

Every March something absolutely amazing happens in the sports world. Fans all around the country pull on their college basketball jerseys, park themselves in front of the television, and stay there for days on end.

It’s called March Madness and it’s the NCAA college basketball tournament. Nothing else in sports compares to it.

March Madness actually begins the first weekend in March when almost every conference in Division I basketball has their conference tournaments. And then at the end of that weekend, on Sunday evening, the brackets are released showing which teams will play where for the NCAA tourney, and then the real madness begins.

Fans all over the country study the brackets and try to pick which teams will win in each of the 6 rounds. Most of this studying is done at work along with a lot of discussion between employees.

One estimate in 2006 stated that companies all across America lose a whopping 3.8 billion dollars in productivity because of the NCAA tournament. But it can’t be helped. No one and nothing can stop March Madness. It’s just that popular.

In fact, even people who never watch sports will go out and buy a jersey of a team that is doing surprisingly well in the tournament. And there are always surprise teams that come out of no where and win a few games in the tournament.

It’s part of the magic of March Madness.

65 teams are selected to play in the tournament. The bottom 2 teams have to play each other in order to make it into the field of 64 teams.

The 64 teams are divided into 4 regions and seeded in each region from 1 to 16. Then the teams play each other with the highest seeds playing the lowest seeds in the first round.

But seeding rarely means anything. In fact, the only seed that’s never lost a first round game is the #1 seed, but it seems more and more likely that a #1 seed will fall in the first round sometime very soon.

You would think teams with a heavy basketball tradition, teams with names on their jerseys like North Carolina, Duke, UCLA, or Indiana would be spared embarrassing defeats at the hands of smaller, much-less known schools, but they aren’t.

Even the defending champion Florida Gators have to watch out. When the ball is thrown up for the opening tip, the team that is against them will be ready to shock the world and pull a huge upset.

March Madness is always full of upsets and buzzer beaters. So many games come right down to the wire that fans have a hard time catching their breath sometimes.

This year promises to be no different. It seems that the Florida Gators, the Ohio State Buckeyes, or possibly the UCLA Bruins have the inside track to win the National Championship, but who really knows? When March Madness begins, any one of 65 teams can win the title, and nobody knows which team it will be until the nets are cut down in early April.