With College basketball season closing, students welcome the infamous tournament fans call March Madness. March Madness is the NCAA Division I basketball tournament played to determine the men and women’s college basketball national champion in college basketball.
March Madness is a single elimination tournament played and consists of 68 teams. This tournament was first played in 1939, with this year being the 86th annual tournament. Known for its upsets and the fan obsession over creating brackets prior to the tournament, it has become one of the greatest and most loved annual sporting events.
The phrase “March Madness” was first used in 1939 by Henry V. Porter, Executive Secretary of the Illinois High School Association, to describe the excitement surrounding the IHSA basketball tournament and people later popularized the phrase then associated it with the NCAA tournament in 1982.
With March Madness being so loved and being so popular, it draws in people who don’t regularly watch basketball. The regular season averages almost three million viewers, while the March Madness tournament averages 12.2 million viewers in the first round, with slight decrease throughout until the final championship game.
In a recent student survey about March Madness, 24% of the responses said they watch the whole season and 30% said they only watch March Madness because of the thrill of the tournament.
Brackets are also popular with fans who create them prior to the tournament’s start and try to predict how the tournament will go. In the survey, 61% of the respondents said they create a bracket. With this information, people who don’t watch all season still make brackets for fun to see how they do.
“I don’t know anything about basketball, but I like to use my limited knowledge of basketball and see how well I do in my bracket,” senior Catherine Nguyen said.
March Madness is currently about to open up the Final Four round of two games with No. 1 seed Florida vs No. 1 seed Auburn and No. 1 seed Houston vs No. 1 seed Duke. These two games will be played on Saturday evening on CBS and the NCAA March Madness streaming app.
