What is March Madness? A Comprehensive Guide to the NCAA Division

Introduction to March Madness

March Madness takes over the U.S. sports cycle every year, but I have a lot of people ask me what exactly it is. So, that is what I’m going to explain. What it is, how it’s put together, and why it’s so dang captivating, so that maybe March Madness, which is going on right now, is something that you can pay attention to. Because who doesn’t want more fun sporting events in their life?

March Madness is just a catchy name. So What is March Madness is a college basketball tournament. What I’m gonna set off to one side is why college sports are so important in the United States. Just work under the assumption that they are, for their unique reasons, because professional sports, except baseball, arrived in the United States late, which means college sports were the main attraction.

The biggest American football stadiums are all for college sports, and tens and tens and tens of millions of people will watch this college basketball tournament, and a hundred million brackets will be filled out for this college basketball tournament. The only mistake you can make here is assuming that they’re like a reserve tournament. It’s more similar to the FA Cup if you just don’t allow the Premier League teams to participate.

It has the tenure and it has that kind of captivating charm of the underdog, the Cinderella story that all of the United States is looking for. Players are made in singular moments in this tournament that will last them a lifetime, and American sports fans will remember for the rest of their lives.

So let’s start at the very beginning. College basketball is about 350 teams at the top level, and these are actual four-year institutions that kids like me, you, or anybody else, would go to to go to school. All 350 of these are sorted into 32 conferences. Think of them as leagues, where you have La Liga, you’ve got the Premier League, you have, in the United States, the ACC, the Atlantic Coast Conference, which covers teams on the East Coast, or the Big Ten, which is by and large a Midwestern conference, as you can see, or the Big 12, which is the South-Central conference, or the SEC, the Southeastern conference, which takes up the Southeast.

They’re all loosely regional and allow these colleges to play against each other. There are six conferences, some of which I’ve already named, that are considered power conferences, and that’s where the majority of the big teams will play. There’s then the next tier of conferences, where you have your mid-majors, and then about half the conferences, where you have colleges and universities of just a few thousand kids and fewer resources to invest in the team. Those are the small majors. We put those at the bottom of this basketball pyramid.

Overview of Basketball Rules

Each team is composed of 15 players, and they are only allowed to attend school for four years. There are various little rules, such as injury exemption, that allow them to play for an extra year or two, but by and large, they’ll be on the team for four years, as freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors. If you watch March Madness, if you watch college basketball, you’ll hear players referred to as, “Oh, he’s an incredible freshman,” or, “What an experienced senior.” These are 18 to 22-year-old kids, depending on what that age is. So, freshmen 18 to 19, sophomores 19 to 20, and you can work out the rest.

Each one of these teams plays through a four-month season. The first two months, you’re playing against teams from other conferences, from other leagues. So you’ll have things like the Big Ten-ACC Challenge, where a Big Ten school plays an ACC school, and there’s pride on the line and those sorts of things. This starts in November. If we have a timeline here, by the time you get to January, you now enter your conference play, and that means you’re playing within your league for the rest of the season.

If we take the ACC, for example, you play 20 conference games, so you can see the conference record of each of the teams in the ACC this year. Duke went 16-4, NC State went 4-16. And if you finish at the top of your conference, congratulations, you’ve won the regular season conference title, and that is one trophy you get to keep.

But we’re not done. This league table is used as seeding for a conference tournament. We’ll just keep using the ACC as an example, but this is happening in different conferences of different sizes, between eight and sixteen teams all around the country. This is the full bracket for the ACC men’s basketball championship. My school, Virginia, finished as the sixth-best team, and so we got to wait for a game before Louisville and Georgia Tech found out who won.

You see how you figure out how to make a tournament, no matter how many teams you have, you just add these extra playing games and then bracket it up, and off you go. You then play this tournament, usually at a location. For the ACC, it’s in Brooklyn. So, you go up to Brooklyn, you get all the teams together, you play on Tuesday, then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and at the end of it, one team has won the ACC tournament championship.

But this is more important than the regular season title because this carries an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, that is March Madness. It is 68 of the best, most rewarded college basketball teams from around the country. They get put into one giant tournament. You might have figured out at this point that out of all the 32 conferences, there is one automatic bid for each conference. That means the winner of the ACC is automatically in the tournament. But so is the winner of the America East, which you won’t hear me say anything about, but Vermont went on to win their tournament title after having an outstanding conference season, as you can see.

And that means Vermont, which you’ve probably never thought about in your life, but is a state and a school, is headed to the NCAA tournament, even though I’ve not watched them all year. Maybe a conference like the Big Sky out West, Montana State had a great year, they ended up winning the tournament as well and defended their regular season title. They’re going to March Madness. And in these smaller conferences, that is the drama because it is very rare for a lot of these conferences to have what you would call a multi-bid league.

Selection Process

Because if there are 68 teams in the tournament and only 32 conferences, the rest of the teams in the tournament are decided by what is called the selection committee. And this gets incredibly controversial, but they pick the next best 36 teams in the country to go. You imagine a lot of these, as you probably figured out, would come from a conference like the ACC, one of the power conferences, of which there is also the Big 12, which is that South-Central conference, the Big East, which is made up of northeastern schools, the Big Ten, which we’ve already discussed, the SEC.

Bracket Creation

There’s also the West Coast’s Pac-12, and there’s a few other conferences that will get a couple of teams in. The American Athletic Conference is one of those in that mid-major of the pyramid. If a team has a good year and doesn’t win the tournament, they can get in too, or the Mountain West, they also could do that too, or the West Coast Conference, the WCC. They got three teams this year. The selection committee sits down on a day called Selection Sunday, and they release the bracket. And the bracket is a beast.

It’s broken into four different parts, but basically, the way the selection committee does it is they make a list of one through 68. This includes all of the people that have to be in the tournament. So all the people from the small conferences are going 68 up, and then you slot in the teams that you feel deserve to be in that didn’t win their conference. Once you’ve slotted them in, one through 68, they then break out into four groups, seated one through 16.

So the four best teams become the four one seeds, the next four teams become the four two seeds, the next four teams become the three seeds, and so on until you get to 16. And then the bracket appears. The matchups are set by that order of one through 68. The favorites are there, and the brackets are nice and fun and interactive, so I can just click on all this fun stuff and who I think is going to win, and off we go.

Tournament Structure

If you’re an intuitive person, you would have realized that brackets can only work out of 64. Then I keep saying 68. That’s because they hold what is called the First Four. It’s the first four games on Tuesday and Wednesday before the tournament starts on Thursday, and then Friday Saturday, and Sunday, and you get the idea. On Tuesday and Wednesday, you have four playing games, so there’ll be two on Tuesday and then two on Wednesday.

But the playing games are interesting. They are the four worst teams in the tournament because you’ll notice that two of the 16 seeds are contested. This is Wright State against Bryant, this is Texas Southern against Texas Corpus Christi. Those are all four conference winners from very small conferences. They have to play each other for the right to even get into the tournament. The other four teams that go to the First Four are the last four at-large teams. That’s the phrase that’s used to refer to the teams that didn’t win their conference but got in anyway.

The last four at-large teams, in this case, would be playing for a spot as an 11 seed, which would be Rutgers and Indiana, or the last two teams in the tournament, who are playing for a 12 seed, which is only 16 seeds in each side. So these are the last two teams the committee judged to deserve to be here. That would be Wyoming and Indiana. And so they’ll go through their different plans, and then on Thursday, it all kicks off. And this is the reason that this is so iconic in the United States.

Why March Madness is Iconic

The first tournament was held in 1939, and for the last 36 years, it’s been expanded up to 64. It expanded incrementally from 1939, but it’s been around for over 80 years as a staple of the US. Worth mentioning that Wyoming and Indiana, which we both mentioned, won national titles in the first five years that it existed. So, history. On that Thursday, and then on that Friday, every single one of the teams that you see in this bracket will play.

Sixteen games a day, starting at 12, and ending well past midnight. Quite simply, as an American, one of the greatest sporting days of the year because every single game is the last game of the season for someone. Every single one. Everyone. The drama that creates, especially when you only have four years on these teams, and especially if you’re a senior, this is the last college basketball game you’re going to play. If you lose, your entire career is over.

Most of these guys don’t make the NBA. Some of them go play overseas. They play in the developmental leagues in the US. But it’s over. Let’s set it in the brackets. The brackets are very, very fun to fill out. Unfortunately, by the time you’re reading the blog, the brackets have all already been filled out. That’s so you know I’m not promoting some sort of bracket thing.

And then when you hit a great upset, you say, “Well, I think Colgate’s going to beat Wisconsin.” And when it hits, you get some all-time rush. I always end up in like three to four different bracket groups, and you just sit there and hold your bracket on those first couple of days, hoping it doesn’t explode. There’s never been a perfect bracket, though, and there probably never will be. At least, unless somebody figures out a way to computer generate every single iteration of the bracket. But I think it’s like a nine quintillion to one chance or something.

So, I hate math. But this is the last section of why it takes over the United States so much. And it’s because of the bracket. And it’s because it can completely dominate the sports cycle. It is just so darn interesting to watch this sort of dramatic stuff happen on a large scale. The buzzer-beaters and those sorts of things, which you can think of as the last-second winners, and everything changes, and those heroes emerge.

The huge upsets. There was a 13 seed that made the final four teams of the whole tournament at one point, and people were losing their minds. There always seems to be a team that wins a couple of games that nobody sees coming because they have a special player or two that we don’t know about until these next couple of days. But that is March Madness. And then throughout the next three weekends, it will end, and we will crown a national championship for college basketball. And in November, a whole process is going to start all over again.

Encouragement to Watch

And I, for one, am looking forward to it. Because Virginia missed the tournament this year. If you’re thinking about watching March Madness now, I highly encourage it. It’s going on right now as you’re reading this blog, at least if you’re watching it in the first two and a half weeks since it came out. But seriously, if you’re watching in the first two days, there’s probably a game on right now or three that you could be watching.

Even if you don’t understand basketball, at least now you know the premise. If you do understand basketball, skip the next two minutes. If you don’t, stick around. Okay, are you ready? The premise of basketball is to put the ball in the hoop. The fouls are similar to soccer or football, where hitting somebody is a foul. Who initiates the contact is the question, much the same as it is in soccer or football. If you put the ball in the hoop from inside the big arc, then it’s two points.

If you put the ball in the hoop from outside the big arc, it’s three points. And if you get fouled, which, you know, you get fouled while you’re shooting the ball towards the goal, then you go to that little line in the middle and you take as many free throws that you would have for the shot. So if the shot was inside the arc, it’s two points. If the shot was outside of the arc, then you get three shots. They’re all worth one point. You’ll see dudes at the line spinning the ball. And if they hit them both, you know, they’re one point apiece. That’s all the scoring.

You have to dribble the ball at all times or you can’t move. You get about two courtesy steps. And after that, you have to keep one foot playing it on the floor. The rest of the time you’re dribbling the ball. You get five players on the floor and you can make changes anytime you want when the play is stopped. So whistle, boom, go make a change. But you keep those five players on the floor.

Usually one of them is tall. Usually one of them helps run the offense. But it’s pretty fluid. And that is a crash course in basketball in under two minutes. So I hope you’re able to enjoy March Madness because it is one of the most special sporting events, I think, anywhere in the world. It’s somebody who tries to enjoy all the biggest sporting events in the world. March Madness is right up there for me. So if you have any questions, hit the comments. I will try my best to answer them.