NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament

Based on Wikipedia: NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament

Every March, roughly one hundred million Americans fill out brackets predicting which college basketball team will win it all. Most of those brackets are busted by the second weekend. This annual ritual of hope and heartbreak is March Madness, and it has become one of the most compelling sporting events in the country—not despite its chaos, but because of it.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I men's basketball tournament is a single-elimination competition. One loss and you're done. This format is what makes it electric. A small school from a conference nobody's heard of can knock off a powerhouse that spent the whole season ranked in the top five. These upsets happen every single year, and predicting them has become a national obsession.

The Origins: Eight Teams and a Dream

The tournament began in 1939, the brainchild of Ohio State coach Harold Olsen. The University of Oregon won that first championship, a fact that surprises most basketball fans who associate the early decades of college hoops with programs from the Midwest and East Coast.

For its first eleven years, the tournament consisted of just eight teams. The country was divided into geographical districts, and each district sent one representative. This created immediate problems. What if two excellent teams happened to be in the same district? One of them stayed home.

In 1950, this system reached a breaking point. Kentucky was ranked third in the nation. North Carolina State was ranked fifth. Both were in the same district. The National Collegiate Athletic Association suggested they play each other for the single available spot. Kentucky's coach refused, arguing that his higher-ranked team deserved the automatic bid. The whole situation was absurd—two of the five best teams in America fighting over one tournament slot while lesser teams elsewhere waltzed in unopposed.

The next year, the tournament doubled to sixteen teams.

The Rival Tournament Nobody Remembers

Here's something most basketball fans don't realize: for decades, the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament wasn't even the most prestigious postseason event in college basketball.

That honor belonged to the National Invitation Tournament, or NIT, which had started a year earlier in 1939. The NIT was held entirely in New York City at Madison Square Garden, and because New York was the media capital of America, the NIT received significantly more press coverage. Getting invited to play in the Garden was the bigger deal.

The two tournaments coexisted awkwardly. In 1950, City College of New York won both championships in the same season—a feat that would never happen again. Shortly after, the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned teams from participating in both tournaments.

But the NIT remained competitive for prestige through the early 1970s. In 1970, eighth-ranked Marquette was invited to the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament but their coach, Al McGuire, didn't like where his team had been placed in the bracket. So Marquette declined the invitation and went to the NIT instead, which they won.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association was not amused.

In 1971, they added a new rule: any team that declined an invitation to their tournament was banned from participating in any other postseason tournament. Suddenly the choice was simple. Accept the National Collegiate Athletic Association bid or don't play at all.

The NIT never recovered. Today it's essentially a consolation bracket for teams that didn't make the main event.

The At-Large Revolution

The other major change that transformed the tournament happened in 1975. Before then, conferences could only send one team—their conference champion. This meant that the second-best team in a strong conference stayed home while the champion of a weak conference got in automatically.

The injustices piled up. In 1971, the University of Southern California was ranked second in the entire country. They didn't make the tournament. Why? Their conference, the Pacific-8, was already represented by top-ranked UCLA. In 1974, Maryland was ranked third nationally and didn't make it because they lost their conference tournament championship game to North Carolina State, who went on to win the whole thing.

In 1975, the tournament expanded to thirty-two teams and introduced at-large bids—invitations given to strong teams regardless of whether they won their conference. Now a conference could have multiple representatives. The modern era had begun.

Seeds and Drama

Seeding—the practice of ranking teams one through sixteen in each region so that the best teams face the weakest teams in early rounds—didn't exist at first. It was introduced gradually, becoming fully implemented in 1979.

The seeding system creates the tournament's signature drama. A one seed is supposed to beat a sixteen seed. A two seed is supposed to beat a fifteen seed. When they don't, the collective gasp is audible across America.

For decades, a sixteen seed had never beaten a one seed. It seemed impossible. Then in 2018, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County crushed top-seeded Virginia by twenty points. The impossible had happened, and millions of brackets went up in flames.

This is what single-elimination does. In a seven-game series, the better team almost always wins. In a single game, anything can happen. A hot shooting night. A key player in foul trouble. A lucky bounce. The format is fundamentally unfair to the best teams, and that's precisely what makes it irresistible to watch.

The Magic Number: Sixty-Four

In 1985, the tournament expanded to sixty-four teams, a number that would define the event for the next twenty-five years. No more byes. No more play-in games. Every team had to win six games to become national champion. The bracket became a perfect binary tree, easy to draw, easy to understand, easy to fill out on your office pool sheet.

This expansion coincided with the explosion of cable television. More games meant more broadcasts meant more eyeballs meant more money. The tournament became appointment viewing for the entire month of March.

The structure also created the concept that would give the event its enduring nickname: the Final Four. This refers to the last four teams standing, the ones who survived their regional brackets to reach the national semifinals. Though teams had been advancing to a four-team semifinal stage since 1952, the term "Final Four" wasn't used in official branding until the 1980s. Now it's trademarked.

The Billion-Dollar Broadcast

Today, the tournament is broadcast by a consortium of networks: CBS, TBS, TNT, and truTV. The current contract, which runs through 2032, pays nearly nine hundred million dollars per year for the broadcast rights. That's almost a billion dollars annually just for the privilege of showing these games.

Where does all that money go? The National Collegiate Athletic Association distributes it to participating schools based on how far they advance. Each game a team wins generates revenue not just for that school but for their entire conference. This creates fascinating dynamics. When a small school from a minor conference makes a deep tournament run, they're generating millions of dollars for their conference rivals back home.

The players, famously, receive none of this money directly. They're amateurs, at least in the technical sense. This has been one of the most contentious issues in American sports, and it's slowly changing through name, image, and likeness deals that allow players to profit from their own celebrity. But the core structure—schools and broadcasters making enormous sums while players compete for scholarships and exposure—remains intact.

The Bracket as Cultural Phenomenon

Filling out a bracket has become an American ritual, like watching the Super Bowl or eating turkey on Thanksgiving. Estimates suggest sixty to one hundred million brackets are completed each year.

The appeal is democratic. You don't need to know anything about basketball to participate. You can pick teams based on mascots, jersey colors, which states you've visited, or pure random chance. Because upsets are guaranteed, even the most carefully researched bracket will have errors. The expert and the novice are separated by margins slim enough to feel like luck.

Warren Buffett once offered a billion dollars to anyone who could fill out a perfect bracket. Nobody has ever come close. The odds of picking all sixty-three games correctly (assuming you're just guessing) are approximately one in nine quintillion. Even if you know basketball, the odds are still astronomical. There are simply too many games and too many opportunities for chaos.

The Dynasties

Despite the format's built-in randomness, certain programs have dominated. UCLA holds the record with eleven championships, ten of them won under coach John Wooden between 1964 and 1975. Wooden's run remains the most remarkable sustained excellence in college basketball history. At one point, UCLA won seven consecutive national championships. Nobody else has won more than two in a row.

The University of Kentucky has eight titles, spread across decades and multiple coaching eras. The University of Connecticut has six, including a remarkable run of four championships in the seven tournaments from 2011 to 2024. The University of North Carolina also has six, Duke University has five, and the University of Kansas has four.

These blueblood programs benefit from a self-reinforcing cycle. Success attracts better recruits. Better recruits lead to more success. More success generates more television revenue and better facilities. The rich get richer, tournament after tournament.

And yet every March, some program nobody was watching makes a run that captures the nation's imagination. The tournament format ensures that Goliath can always fall.

The Pandemic Interruption

In 2020, for the first time in its history, the tournament was cancelled entirely. The COVID-19 pandemic was spreading rapidly across the United States, and large gatherings were being prohibited nationwide. The National Collegiate Athletic Association initially considered playing a shortened version with just sixteen teams, but as the scale of the crisis became clear, they pulled the plug completely.

The Selection Committee had been working on their bracket when the cancellation was announced. They never released it. We'll never know who would have been in and who would have been left out. An entire year of college basketball simply ended without resolution.

The following year, the entire tournament was held in one state—Indiana—to minimize travel and reduce infection risk. Teams stayed in National Collegiate Athletic Association-provided accommodations until they were eliminated. The schedule was adjusted to allow time for testing and quarantine. It worked. The tournament went forward, Baylor beat Gonzaga in the championship, and the annual tradition resumed.

Why It Matters

The tournament matters because it's one of the few remaining sporting events where the stakes feel genuinely life-changing for the participants. Professional athletes make millions whether they win or lose. March Madness players are representing their schools, their families, their hometowns. A deep tournament run can transform a small program's national profile. A championship becomes part of school identity forever.

It matters because the format refuses to protect favorites. There's no second chance, no next game to make adjustments, no margin for error. Play your worst game on the wrong day and your season is over, regardless of how dominant you were in February.

And it matters because it's become woven into American life in ways that transcend sports. Office pools bring coworkers together. Family group chats explode with reactions to every upset. For three weeks each spring, millions of people who don't normally follow college basketball suddenly have opinions about mid-major conference champions and freshman point guards.

The tournament is chaos organized into brackets, hope organized into sixty-three games, and one of the few things in American life that millions of people experience simultaneously, together, with genuine uncertainty about what happens next.

That's the magic. Nobody knows who's going to win. Not the experts, not the algorithms, not the teams themselves. Every March, we fill out our brackets knowing they're probably wrong, and we watch anyway, because anything can happen.

And every March, it does.