Scott Albig
517-442-7209
March Madness, a Primer.


Its that time of year again!  March Madness! Well, first week of March through the first week of April, anyway 
You can hear the frenzy to fill out brackets all across campus, and feel the tension in the air. This is the time when people pit their intellectual might, at least in terms of basketball knowledge, against each other in a battle to see who knows most about college hoops. 
But what exactly is March Madness? It is the popular term for season ending college basketball tournaments played in the month that bears its name, and the concentrated hype of 65 teams vying for college basketballs biggest prize. 
These 65 teams are selected on the Thursday to Sunday before the first match, by a committee of certain athletic directors and conference commissioners, and their announcement comes out on Selection Sunday. These 64 teams are then broken down into four regions, each one taking 16 teams (except for one that takes 17). The region with 17 teams has a tournament within a tournament between the two lowest ranked teams to determine who takes that 16 spot.
This is where the brackets begin to come into play.  The purpose of brackets is to predict what teams will win where and against whom, people, and groups of people (including many right here on campus!), are doing it all across the nation for fun.  Brackets break down as the tournament plays out, eliminating one team at a time until there is only one, forming important incarnations, such as:  the Sweet 16, followed by the Elite 8, to the Final 4, and finally the Championship Game.
What happens when a team wins that game and becomes the Champion of College Basketball? 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.
