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The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship is a single elimination tournament held each spring featuring 65[1] college basketball teams in the United States. Colloquially known as March Madness (as the tournament takes place mainly during the month of March) or the Big Dance (as opposed to the now smaller and less prestigious NIT), the tournament takes place over 3 weeks at sites across the United States, and the national semifinals (the Final Four) have become one of the nation's most prominent sporting events.
Since its 1939 inception (a brainchild of Phog Allen at the University of Kansas), it has built a legacy that includes dynasty teams and dramatic underdog stories. In recent years, friendly wagering on the event has become something of a national pastime, spawning countless "office pools" that attract expert fans and novices alike. All games of the tournament are broadcast on the CBS broadcast television network in the United States, except for the Opening Round game (or "play-in game" as it has been called), which aired on TNN in 2001, and ESPN since 2002.
The tournament bracket is made up of conference tournament champions from each Division I conference, which receive automatic bids. The remaining slots are at-large berths, with teams chosen by an NCAA selection committee. The selection process and tournament seedings are based on several factors, including team rankings, win-loss records and RPI data.
Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) play the "opening round" game to determine which will advance into the first round of the tournament, with the winner advancing to play the top seed in one of the four regions. The opening Round game was added in 2001 and has been played in University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year. The opening round is considered part of the tournament and is often referred to as a "play-in" game.
A Most Outstanding Player honor is awarded by the Associated Press at the end of each tournament.
At 11 national titles, UCLA currently holds the record for the most NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships. University of Kentucky is second, with 7 national titles.
Tournament formatA total of 65[1] teams qualify for the tournament played in March and April. Thirty-one of the teams earn automatic bids by winning their respective conference tournaments. Because the Ivy League does not conduct a post-season tournament, its regular-season conference champion receives an automatic bid. The remaining teams are granted at-large bids, which are extended by the NCAA Selection Committee.
The tournament is split into four regions and each region has teams seeded 1–16, with the committee making every region as comparable to the others as possible. The best team in each region plays the #16 team, the #2 team plays the #15, and so on. The effect of this seeding structure ensures that the better a team is seeded, the worse-seeded their opponents will be.
Two teams play a play-in game game on the Tuesday preceding the first weekend of the tournament, with the winner of that game advancing to the main draw of the tournament and plays a top seed in one of the regionals. This game has been played at the University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio since its inception in 2001. This game originated in 2001 with the addition of the Mountain West Conference (and its automatic bid into the tournament) after the NCAA tournament committee opted to include an additional team and play in game in lieu of taking away one of the 34 "at-large" bids. These two teams share equally in the share of funds as if they had qualified for a first round game, and wins in the opening round game are considered wins in the NCAA tournament. Thus, properly, the tournament has 65 teams, although in practice most brackets only include the 63 teams, with one spot blank (to be filled in after the play-in game). Since no #16 seed has ever beaten a #1 seed in the men's championship, the result of the opening round game is largely deemed irrelevant for bracket-filling purposes.
Since 2002, the tournament has used the so-called "pod" system, in which the eight first- and second-round sites are distributed around the four regionals. Before the 2002 tournament, all teams playing at a first- or second-round site fed into the same regional tournament. The pod system was designed to limit the early-round travel of as many teams as possible.
In the pod system, each regional bracket is divided into four-team "pods". The possible pods by seeding are:
Pod #1: 1v16, 8v9 Pod #2: 2v15, 7v10 Pod #3: 3v14, 6v11 Pod #4: 4v13, 5v12 Each of the eight first and second round sites is assigned two pods, where each group of four teams play each other. A host site's pods may be from different regions, and thus the winners of each pod would advance into separate regional tournaments.
The first and second round games are played on the first weekend of the tournament, either on Thursday and Saturday or Friday and Sunday. The teams which are still alive after the first weekend advance to the regional semi-finals (the Sweet Sixteen) and finals (the Elite Eight) played on the second weekend of the tournament (again, the games are split into Thursday/Saturday and Friday/Sunday).
The winners of each region advance to the Final Four, where the national semifinals are played on Saturday and the national championship is played on Monday. Before the 2004 tournament, the pairings for the semifinals were based on an annual rotation. For example, in 2000, the winner of the West Regional played the winner of the Midwest regional, and the South winner played the East winner; in 2001, the West winner played the East winner and the South played the Midwest; in 2002, the West played the South and the East played the Midwest. Since 2004 and in response to complaints that too often the two best teams remaining squared off in a semifinal game and not in the final game (such as when the last two remaining 1 seeds, Kansas and Maryland, played in one semifinal while a 2 seed and a 5 seed played in the other semifinal), the pairings are determined by the ranking of the four top seeds against each other. The four number one seeds are ranked before the tournament begins: in 2006, Duke was the overall #1 seed, followed by Connecticut, Villanova and Memphis. Which regional winner is to face which other regional winner is determined based on this ranking. Had all of the #1 seeds reached the Final Four, Duke (from the South) would have played Memphis (from the West) and Connecticut (from the East) would have played Villanova (from the Midwest). As it happened, none of the #1 seeds made the Final Four in 2006, but the South winner (LSU) still played the West winner (UCLA) in a #2/#4 matchup, while the East (George Mason) played the Midwest (Florida) in a #11/#3 matchup.
The brackets are not reseeded after each round. The tournament is single-elimination and there are no consolation games—although there was a third-place game as late as 1981, and each regional had a third-place game through the 1975 tournament. The single-elimination format produces opportunities for Cinderella teams to advance despite playing much tougher teams. Nonetheless, despite the numerous instances of early-round Tournament upsets, including four instances of a #15 seed defeating a #2 seed, no #1 seed has ever lost in the first round to a #16 seed. The closest calls came in 1989 when Georgetown University defeated Princeton University 50–49 and the University of Oklahoma beat East Tennessee State 72–71, and in 1990 when Michigan State had to go to overtime to beat Murray State.
Format history
The NCAA tournament has expanded a number of times in the last 65 seasons. This is a breakdown of the history of the tournament format:
1939–1950: eight teams 1951–1952: 16 teams 1953–1974: varied from 22-25 teams 1975–1978: 32 teams 1979: 40 teams 1980–1982: 48 teams 1983: 52 teams (four play-in games before the tournament) 1984: 53 teams (five play-in games before the tournament) 1985–2000: 64 teams 2001— : 65 teams (with an "opening round" game to determine whether the 64th or 65th team plays in the first round) For more details on this topic, see NCAA basketball tournament selection process.A special selection committee appointed by the NCAA determines which 65 teams will enter the tournament, and where they will be seeded and placed in the bracket. Because of the automatic bids, only 39 teams (the at-large bids) rely on the selection committee to secure them a spot in the tournament. Conference tournament champions automatically make it into the tournament.
Records and resultsFurther information: NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship records
March MadnessMarch 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 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. The Big Dance also refers exclusively to the NCAA Tournaments to distinguish them from the conference tournaments and the NIT.
As a tournament ritual, the winning team cuts down the net at the end of the regional championship game (and the national championship game). Each player cuts a single strand off of the net for themselves, commemorating their victory, with the head coach cutting the last strand and claiming the net itself. Furthermore, the regional champs (starting in 2007) receive a bronze plated NCAA Regional Championship trophy (previously given to only the Final Four teams that did not make the championship game), and the National Champions also receive a gold plated NCAA National Championship trophy. The loser of the championship game receives a silver plated National Runner-Up trophy for second place.
The National Association of Basketball Coaches also presents a more elaborate marble/crystal trophy to the top-ranked team in its end-of-season coaches' poll, which is invariably the same as the NCAA championship game winner. This trophy, currently sponsored by Siemens, is not affiliated with the NCAA and is presented at a later press conference.
History of the termH. V. Porter, an official with the Illinois High School Association (and later a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame) was the first person to use March Madness to commemorate a basketball tournament. A gifted writer, Porter published an essay named March Madness in 1939 and in 1942 used the phrase in a poem, Basketball Ides of March. Through the years the use of March Madness picked up steam, especially in Illinois and other parts of the Midwest. During this period the term was used almost exclusively in reference to state high school tournaments. In 1977, the IHSA published a book about its tournament titled March Madness.
Fans began connecting the term to the NCAA tournament in the early 1980s. Evidence suggests that CBS sportscaster Brent Musburger, who had worked for many years in Chicago prior to joining CBS, popularized the term during the annual tournament broadcasts.
Only in the 1990s did either the IHSA or NCAA think about trademarking the term, and by that time a small television production company named Intersport, Inc., had beaten them both to the punch. IHSA eventually bought the trademark rights from Intersport and then went after big game, suing GTE Vantage, Inc., an NCAA licensee that used the name March Madness for a computer game based on the college tournament. In an historic ruling, Illinois High School Association v. GTE Vantage, Inc. (1996), the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit created the concept of a "dual-use trademark", granting both the IHSA and NCAA the right to trademark the term for their own purposes.
Following the ruling, the NCAA and IHSA joined forces and created the March Madness Athletic Association to coordinate the licensing of the trademark and investigate possible trademark infringement. One such case involved a company that had obtained the Internet domain name marchmadness.com and was using it to post information about the NCAA tournament. After protracted litigation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in March Madness Athletic Association v. Netfire, Inc. (2003) that March Madness was not a generic term and ordered Netfire to relinquish the domain name.