There’s one time of year that all basketball fans wait patiently for: March. That’s when the chaos, or rather, madness, begins.
March Madness is the nickname for the National Collegiate Athletes Association’s basketball tournament, which generally lasts from mid-March to early April. Fans everywhere are gearing up to see if their team has what it takes to fight through a 68 team-bracket and rise as the NCAA Champions.
However, the fun of March Madness isn’t simply predicting how well your favorite team will do or how many games they’ll win. March Madness is all about being able to predict the outcome of the entire tournament, not just a few select teams. Every year, millions of fans take part in filling out brackets to predict which team will win this year’s tournament. Some veteran fans have gotten bracket building down to a science, which is referred to as bracketology, and typically finish the tournament with the most accurate bracket.
In order to make the perfect bracket, it’s important to understand how the teams are divided and how the schedule of games is decided. The teams are broken up into four different divisions based on location: East, West, Midwest, and South. Teams are then seeded with numbers one through 16, with one being the highest seed and 16 being the lowest. As with all tournaments, the first seed will play the sixteenth seed, the second seed will play the fifteenth seed, and so on, until all teams have been matched up.
After each matchup has been decided, it’s time to start filling out that bracket. To begin, start working your way through each round and decide which team has the best chance of winning. Each team that you choose to win will move to the next open space in your bracket, while the losing team will be dropped and no longer included in the bracket.
This process may seem easy early in the first few rounds, but when the tournament winds down to the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight or the Final Four, match-ups get harder to predict, and major upsets are bound to occur. To avoid beginner’s mistakes, be sure to read up on the stats of each team, and take winning odds from previous matchups into account.
Once you’ve finished painstakingly filling out your bracket, that’s when the real fun begins, when you watch the tournament to see how your bracket stacks up against the competition. The first round will take place on March 15-16 in Dayton, Ohio.
Now this may seem like a lot of work for a casual fan, but worry not, as with most sporting challenges there is always a reward. The NCAA, Fox Sports, Yahoo and a number of other sporting affiliates offer prizes for which ever fan enters the most accurate bracket into their contest. The prizes can range from event tickets to trips to enormous sums of cash.
Whether you’re looking to make some money through your bracket or just want to put your favorite team down as the winner, filling out a bracket is the best way to get in on all of the action for March Madness. Through the wins, losses, upsets and horribly busted brackets, March is sure to become your favorite month with this extra dose of madness.
