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Podcast Transcript
Every March, the United States experiences a period known as March Madness. It is the time when college basketball teams compete for a national championship.
The process of crowning a national champion is a months-long process where teams vie for a chance to make the national tournament.
Once there, in theory, every team that makes the big dance has a shot at becoming a champion. All you have to do is win five, or maybe six, consecutive games.
Learn more about March Madness and how the NCAA Basketball tournament works on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
If you don’t happen to live in North America, there is something peculiar about North American sports.
We really like to crown our champions on the field.
For example, the English Premier League crowns its champion after a glorified round-robin. It is a perfectly acceptable method of determining a champion, but the fact that someone can become a champion before the season is complete just doesn’t sit right with us.
College football and NASCAR used to have systems where they had championships not determined on the field, and they ultimately changed it so champions were crowned in championship matchups.
To put it more succinctly, in the immortal words of the great Ric Flair, “To be the man, you got to beat the man.”
The NCAA basketball tournament is, in some ways, the ultimate manifestation of this philosophy.
Before I go any further, just for those of you who don’t live in the United States or follow sports, the NCAA stands for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They are the governing body for most intercollegiate sports in the United States.
They set rules and declare champions in a host of sports, including track and field, baseball, softball, gymnastics, volleyball, swimming, golf, and other sports.
When I am referring to the NCAA basketball tournament, which is what the term March Madness is referring to, I’m referring to the Division One men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
With that, what we now call March Madness began with the first NCAA men’s basketball tournament in 1939.
The tournament was organized by the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), with strong support from Ohio State coach Harold Olsen. The first championship game was played in Evanston, Illinois, and the Oregon Webfoots, now called the Ducks, defeated Ohio State 46 to 33 to win the inaugural title.
During these formative years, the National Invitation Tournament, or NIT, was considered more prestigious than the NCAA Tournament. Teams that were invited to both would often choose the NIT over the NCAA Tournament. The early tournaments were primarily regional affairs with limited national attention.
World War II impacted the tournament, with many college-aged men serving in the military. The 1943-1945 tournaments featured depleted rosters, but the competition continued throughout the war despite the lack of players.
These early tournaments consisted of just eight teams. Each of the eight teams was selected to represent different regions of the country to participate.
The 1950s saw the tournament begin to gain prominence. The field expanded to 16 teams in 1951, marking the first significant expansion. The tournament started to establish itself as the premier college basketball championship, gradually surpassing the NIT in prestige and media coverage.
The NIT still exists today. However, it doesn’t get very much attention because the teams that participate are those who weren’t given invitations to the NCAA tournament. So the entire affair is really just a consolation prize for teams to be declared the 69th-best team in the country.
The game that really brought the tournament to greater prominence was the 1957 championship game between North Carolina and Kansas.
Played on March 23, 1957, in Kansas City, the game featured an undefeated North Carolina team coached by Frank McGuire facing off against a heavily favored Kansas squad led by its star player, Wilt Chamberlain.
Despite Chamberlain’s dominance, North Carolina employed a strategy of double and triple-teaming him, limiting his effectiveness. The game remained tightly contested, with both teams struggling to score, taking the game into a third overtime. Ultimately, North Carolina edged out Kansas 54-53, sealing their first national title.
1964 saw the start of the greatest dynasty in men’s collegiate basketball, the UCLA Bruins. Under the guidance of the great coach John Wooden, during a 12-year period from 1964 to 1975, UCLA won ten championships, including a record seven in a row.
These UCLA teams produced some of the greatest players ever, including the likes of Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton.
Because the teams participating in the tournament were selected by a committee, there were always teams who missed out and felt they should have been included.
To address this and to generate more TV money, the tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1975, allowing more schools to participate. The field grew again to 40 teams in 1979, 48 teams in 1980, and finally 64 teams in 1985.
The 1979 championship game between Michigan State, led by Magic Johnson, and Indiana State, led by Larry Bird, remains a landmark moment in the history of the tournament. The game drew a record television audience, and the Johnson-Bird rivalry would carry into the NBA in the 1980s.
The 1970s also saw the rise of women’s basketball. With the passage of the Title IX Act in 1972, women’s sports were given greater attention.
Beginning in 1972, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, or AIAW, organized a national women’s championships. The AIAW hosted the tournament because women’s basketball wasn’t yet recognized as an NCAA sport.
In 1981, the NCAA announced it would begin sponsoring a women’s basketball tournament, leading to competition with the AIAW. This culminated in 1982, when the NCAA held its first Women’s Division I Basketball Tournament, marking the end of the AIAW era.
The inaugural 1982 tournament had 32 teams.
That year, Louisiana Tech won the first NCAA title by defeating Cheyney State.
The 1985 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game, played on April 1, 1985, is considered one of the greatest upsets in college basketball history. The game featured the Villanova Wildcats, an 8-seed, against the heavily favored Georgetown Hoyas, the defending national champions led by Patrick Ewing.
Villanova, coached by Rollie Massimino, played a near-perfect game, shooting an astonishing 78.6% from the field, the highest ever in a championship game. Using a patient offensive approach and disciplined defense, Villanova managed to neutralize Georgetown’s dominant presence inside. In the final minutes, Villanova’s clutch free throws sealed a 66-64 victory, making them the lowest-seeded team ever to win the national championship.
In the 1980s, the women’s tournament grew in size. There were 36 teams in 1983, 40 teams in 1986, 48 teams in 1989, and 64 teams in 1994 when it finally reached parity with the men’s tournament.
The development of the 64-team tournament and its perfect symmetry began the tradition of people filling out a tournament bracket.
More on that in a bit….
As the tournament became more popular and television rights brought in more money, there was more pressure to increase the size of the tournament.
In 2010, rumors began to circulate that they were considering expanding the tournament by another full round to 128 teams, or at least 96 teams.
Instead, they just added four more teams for a total of 68. These four extra teams would have to play another round to make it to the main tournament of 64.
The women’s tournament eventually expanded to 68 teams in 2022.
So, how does the tournament work today?
?As of the 2024–25 season, there are 364 NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams and 362 NCAA Division I women’s basketball teams.
There are currently 34 men’s programs that have never made the NCAA tournament in any year.
So, at the outset of a season, there is an approximately 18% chance for any team to make the tournament.
Almost every team is a member of a conference. There are currently 31 Division One conferences for NCAA basketball for both men and women.
Each conference will have its own champion, which is determined by a conference tournament.
Every conference champion is given automatic entry into the tournament. The remaining 37 spots are determined by a selection committee.
The selection committee not only picks the remaining 37 teams but also gives each team a seed.
The tournament consists of four different regions. Each region is seeded one through sixteen. The regions are only loosely assigned on the basis of geography. The regions have more to do the location of where the games are played than the teams that are seeded.
The selection committee will pick teams and make seedings based on a team’s record and strength of schedule.
Both the men’s and women’s selection committees consist of approximately twelve members consisting of athletic directors of schools and commissioners of athletic conferences.
All conference tournaments take place during the first or second weekend in March. After the finals of all the conference tournaments, the full tournament bracket is released in what is known as selection Sunday.
The NIT also releases their bracket on the same day.
Each subsequent weekend, two rounds of the tournament are held at locations around the country, with the play-in round with the 65th to 68th teams playing a few days before.
The tournament takes place over three weekends. The round of sixteen is known as the Sweet Sixteen. The round of eight is known as the Elite Eight.
The final weekend of the tournament has the winner of each region meet in what is known as the Final Four.
The men’s and women’s tournaments generally overlap, but the games are not scheduled at the same time, especially in the later rounds.
Given that there are so many teams in the tournament, in theory, every team has a chance of winning. However, the odds of lower-seeded teams winning are minuscule.
In the 40 years since the men’s tournament expanded to 64 teams, there have been 160 matchups between a number 1 seed and a number 16 seed.
In those 160 matchups, the record of the number one seed is 158 and 2. In 2018, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, defeated number one seed Virginia, and in 2023, 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson upset the one-seed Purdue.
In the women’s tournament, it has only happened once. In 1998, number 16 seed Harvard defeated the number one seed Stanford.
Generally speaking, underdogs have had a much harder time in the women’s tournament. The lowest seed to reach the women’s final four was the nine-seed Alabama in 1998.
The lowest seed to win the women’s tournament was only three seed which has happened three times: North Carolina in 1994, Tennessee in 1997, and LSU in 2023.
In the men’s tournament, the lowest seed to make the final four was an eleven seed, which has happened six times.
As previously mentioned, Villanova was the lowest seed to win the tournament at an eight seed.
As slim as the odds might be of a low seed winning the tournament, the odds of someone picking a perfect bracket are astronomical.
Picking every single game correctly in the 64-team field is approximately 1 in 9.22 quintillion.
If you include the full 68-team field, that increases to 1 in 147 quintillion.
This is assuming that every team has a 50-50 chance of winning every game, which is, of course, not true. However, it is impossible to take the odds of winning given the relative strength of the teams into consideration because you don’t know what the matchups will be beforehand.
Even if you could, the odds would still probably be in the quadrillions.
Needless to say, no one has ever selected a perfect bracket.
In 2014, Warren Buffet offered a one billion dollar prize to anyone who could pick a perfect bracket.
The best performance ever was in 2019 by Greg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio. He correctly picked the winners of the first 49 games of the tournament, becoming the only person ever to correctly pick the winner of every game in the first two rounds.
One of the reasons why March Madness is so popular is because of the sheer number of games; you are always guaranteed to have some sort of drama. There will be last-second buzzer beaters, underdog wins, and some sort of human interest story.
With so many schools across the country and so many people with an interest in the outcome of the tournament, there is a good reason why its called March Madness.