March Madness

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.

March Madness is a phenomenon that grips the national sports psyche from the first week of March through the first week of April. March Madness is the moniker that is given to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments. These tournaments determine the national champions of college basketball.

The NCAA tournaments are an American tradition that sends millions of fans into a synchronized frenzy each year. It is this chaos that gives the tournament its March Madness nickname. March Madness is the concentrated hype of 65 teams vying for college basketball's biggest prize. It's the last-second, buzzer-beating baskets, the euphoria of winning to play another day, and the agony of losing and going home.

In this article, we will break down the brackets of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and look at how teams are selected, how they are seeded and how the champions of college basketball are determined. 

Decision Criteria

The committee is sequestered in a hotel during the selection process, not unlike a jury for an important court case. This committee must weigh the evidence provided to them though certain criteria. During the selection process, each member must submit a list of teams that should, without a doubt, be in the tournament. This list cannot include the school that the member represents. If eight members put a team on their list, that team is put into the field of tournament teams.

Here are some of the criteria used by the selection committees:

* Rating Percentage Index (RPI) (Current RPI Rankings
* Ranking in national polls
* Conference record
* Road record
* Wins versus ranked opponents
* How a team finishes the regular season 

There is also an "adjusted RPI" used by the selection committee. The adjustments take into account such factors as wins against highly ranked teams. This adjusted RPI is not made public.

For those teams that aren't invited, there is no appeals process. The committee's decisions are final. The only conciliation for these teams is the possibility of playing in the National Invitational Tournament (NIT), which invites another 32 teams for postseason play.

Now that you've learned how teams are selected, let's go to the next section and look at how teams are seeded by the committee. 

March Madness Tournament Play

The NCAA tournament is played over a period of three weeks, usually beginning on the third Thursday in March. After the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth teams of the men's tournament play in an opening round, the real tournament begins. In the women's tournament, there is no sixty-fifth team so there is no "opening round."

Over the first two full days of the tournament, the field of 64 teams is pared to 32. In the next two days, the field is trimmed to 16 -- the Sweet 16, as it is often called. These final 16 teams take a four-day break before resuming play on the next Thursday. During the second week of the tournament, the field is trimmed from 16 to four. These teams comprise the tournament's

In the third and final week of the tournament, the teams that survive the mayhem of March and make it to the Final Four battle it out in April for the crown of college basketball. In the next section, we will take a closer look at this final championship game.

Seed Facts

• A No. 16 seed has never won a tournament game.
• A No. 8 seed is the highest seed to win a national championship (Villanova, 1985).
• A No. 11 seed is the highest seed to advance to the Final Four (LSU, 1986).
• No. 1 seeds represent 13 of the 26 national champions between 1979 and 2004.
• The only year that at least one No. 1 seed didn't advance to the Final Four was 1980.

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.

March Madness Television

Television has been integral to the success of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The first television broadcast was in 1946, when WCBS-TV broadcast the men's national championship game between University of North Carolina and Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University). Regional television broadcasts began in 1952, and the championship game was televised nationally for the first time in 1954. In 1969, the championship game was broadcast on network television for the first time, on NBC. NBC also televised selected regional games, with first TVS Television Network and later NCAA Productions, the in house production arm of the NCAA, broadcasting first and second round games to the markets where the universities are from. In 1980, ESPN began showing the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament, which established ESPN's following among college basketball fans and was the network's first contract signed with the NCAA for a major sport. In 1982, CBS obtained broadcast television rights to the tournament. In 1991, CBS assumed responsibility for covering all games of the NCAA tournament, with the exception of the "play-in" games. The play-in games are televised by ESPN, except for the first one, which was aired on TNN.

Currently, CBS broadcasts all 63 games of the NCAA tournament. Most areas see eight first round games, seven second round games, and four regional semifinal games (out of the possible 56 games during these rounds). Coverage preempts regular programming on the network. Games are assigned to each television market based on local interest and the presence of a university in the tournament. In all other markets, a featured national game is selected, designated on-screen by a yellow highlighting and the announcer stating "most of you will see..." CBS will then start people with that game and "whip-around" to other action around the tournament if there is more competitive action elsewhere. Each station is also informed of predetermined jump points should their game of local interest become uncompetitive. At these jump points, stations have the option of joining the whip-around coverage. Because of the number of students and alumni watching the game near a university, stations in markets where a university or college playing in the tournament stick with that game, regardless of how competitive it is.

In 1999, DirecTV began broadcasting all games otherwise not shown on local television with its Mega March Madness premium package, at $49. The DirecTV system used the subscriber's zip code to black out games which could be seen on broadcast television. Prior to that, all games were available on C-Band satellite and were picked up by sports bars. In 2003, CBS struck a deal with Yahoo! to offer live streaming of the first three rounds of games under its Yahoo! Platinum service, for $16.95 a month. [2] In 2004, CBS sold access to March Madness On Demand for $9.95, which provided games not otherwise shown on broadcast television. The service was free for AOL subscribers. [3] In 2005, the service charged $19.95 but offered enhanced coverage of pregame and postgame interviews and press conferences. [4] In 2006, March Madness On Demand was made free, but dropped the coverage of interviews and press conferences. The service was profitable and set a record for simultaneous online streams at 268,000.

The Final Four has been broadcast in HDTV since 1999, with all regional games broadcast in HDTV since 2005. In 2005 and 2006, four first and second round sites were designated for HDTV coverage. Viewers with a digital television on a station offering HD coverage will see a HD game, which may be different from the game shown on analog television. From 2000 to 2004, only one first/second round site and one regional site was designated an HDTV site. Some digital television stations choose not to participate in HDTV broadcasts of the first and second rounds and the regional semifinals, and split their signal into digital subchannels to show all games going on simultaneously. Most notably, WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina has split its digital signal four ways since 2000 to show all of the games.

The entire country sees the regional finals, the national semifinals, and the national championship. At the end of the tournament, a highlight reel of the best moments from the tournament is played, to the backdrop of the song One Shining Moment. See also List of NCAA Final Four Broadcasters

The March Madness Final Four

Many sports use a tournament format to decide their champion, including professional sports. The "Final Four" of college basketball refers to the semifinal round of the Division I Men's or Women's Basketball Tournament. In this round, there are four teams left, and two games are played to determine which two teams will head to the finals.

The words "Final Four" belong only to college basketball. In fact, if you watch college basketball you will frequently hear the term, especially from CBS, which uses the phrase "Road to the Final Four" in its coverage.

Making it to the Final Four means that a team won its first four tournament games, and it only has to win two more to be the national champions. A team that reaches this point in the tournament is already envisioning the hanging of a National Championship banner from the rafters of its home arena, which is a common tradition.

As mentioned before, the Final Fours are played in April, but they are still full of the March Madness syndrome. Typically, the men's semifinal games are played on the first Saturday in April, and the women's are played on the first Sunday. The winners of those games move on to face each other in their respective championship games, which are played on the subsequent Monday.

The term Final Four refers to the last four teams remaining the playoff tournament. These are the champions of the tournament's four regional brackets, and the only teams remaining on the tournament's final weekend. (The term has been applied retroactively to include the last four teams in tournaments from earlier years, when only two brackets existed.)

Some claim that the phrase Final Four was first used to describe the final games of Indiana's annual high school basketball tournament. But the NCAA, which has a trademark on the term, says Final Four was originated by a Cleveland Plain Dealer sportswriter, Ed Chay, in a 1975 article that appeared in the Official Collegiate Basketball Guide. The article stated that Marquette University “was one of the final four” in the 1974 tournament. The NCAA started capitalizing the term in 1978, and turning it into a trademark several years later.

Currently, the men's tournament begins with 65 teams. The two teams deemed weakest by the NCAA Selection Committee play the first game (the "play-in game") in Dayton, Ohio, and the field is narrowed down to 64 teams. The women's tournament starts with 64 teams, with no play-in game. The tournament proceeds by means of single elimination play on consecutive weekends in March at preselected sites in the United States.

In the men's tournament, all sites are nominally neutral: teams are prohibited from playing tournament games on their home courts (though in some cases, a team may be fortunate enough to play in or near its home state or city). Under current NCAA rules, any court on which a team hosts more than three regular-season games is considered a "home court" (conference tournament games are not counted for this purpose). In the 2006 tournament, Villanova was able to play its first two games at the Wachovia Center in nearby Philadelphia, a venue where it had played three regular-season home games. A fourth home game at that facility would have disqualified them from playing there. However, some semi-"home" courts (such as George Mason playing its regional at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., not far from its campus in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2006) are mere quirks of scheduling and have been part of the tournament for years.

On the third weekend, traditionally a Saturday and Monday for the men's tournament and a Sunday and Tuesday for the women's tournament, the final four teams meet in semifinals on the first day and the championship on the second. For several years in the men's tournament, the teams eliminated in the semifinals met in a consolation game prior to the championship; this was discontinued in 1981.