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The March Madness

March 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 or Big Dance 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.

Brackets and picks

During March Madness, many people enjoy predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournaments. Bracketology is the art of picking the correct teams that will be in the tournaments. The 65 (including the 2 teams who compete in the play-in game) participating teams are announced by the selection committee on Selection Sunday, although some teams are known to have made it already by winning their conference tournament (See: At-large bid, Automatic bid). The teams are seeded from 1 to 16 in 4 regional groupings around the country. The eventual winners of the four regions then meet at the Final Four in a predetermined location. The four seeds play out the tournament through single eliminaton until a National Champion is crowned.

As a tournament ritual, the winning team cuts down the net at the end of the regional championship game. Each player cuts a single strand off of the net for themselves, commemorating their victory.

Many people fill out tournament brackets in office pools. Entrance fees and legality of the pools themselves vary. Whoever accumulates the most points by accurately predicting the outcomes of the games wins the grand prize, most often pooled from the entrance fees. Points are assessed in different ways; one example is given below:

• First round: 2 point per winning team.

• Second round: 4 points per winning team.

• Third round: 8 points per winning team.

• Fourth round: 16 points per winning team.

• Fifth round: 32 points per winning team.

• Sixth round: 64 points for predicting National Champion.

The point total steadily increases by round in order to reward those players who correctly picked teams that would go further in the tournament.

If at the end of the tournament two players have the same point total, a tie is often broken by the total number of total points scored in the Championship Game.