The true madness of March comes from the college basketball bracket. Every year millions of basketball fans fill out a March Madness bracket to put in their guesses on who is going to win each game and who is going to be on top holding the championship trophy.
Back in 1851, the first ever sports bracket was created at a chess tournament in London, England. The first ever March Madness bracket was in 1939. However, filling out these brackets did not become popular until 1977, when the bracket changed from 25 teams to 64 teams. Adding more teams made it possible for there to be more upsets in the early rounds of the March Madness tournament, which brought in more people to make brackets.
When it comes to making March Madness brackets there is a lot of science and math behind choosing teams. The probability of the perfect March Madness bracket is 1 in 9 quintillion chances. The most realistic choice when selecting who will win is picking the best teams. Selecting a top seeded team has a higher probability of you getting the game correct for who will win. However, selecting those top teams is not always the best decision. Back in 2011, not a single one or two seeded team made it to the Final Four. That goes to show that making a bracket is not always looking at who is seeded higher. Year in and year out, every March a top seeded team ends up losing to a smaller program. Some notable upsets have been Fairleigh Dickinson beating Purdue in 2023. Fairleigh Dickinson was ranked number 16 and Purdue was ranked number one. Another upset was in 2022, where number 15 ranked Saint Peter’s defeated number two ranked Kentucky. Those go to show that getting a mindset of picking the best team to win is not always the best.
People go into brackets with very different mindsets. The only thing that the people making these brackets share in common is the hope of predicting the games right. People also make March Madness brackets for different reasons as well. “I do March Madness brackets because they are really fun to do with picking certain teams to upset. The money aspect of making the brackets is cool as well due to the fact that if my bracket were to be decently accurate I can make money. Making brackets makes it more fun to watch the games too because it makes you pay more attention to them,” senior Patrick Thomas states.
What makes these March Madness games so intriguing to people is the sense of chaos that these basketball games bring out. The unpredictability and the upsets of a smaller school beating a bigger school makes watching these games so fascinating. This makes brackets and just simply watching tournament games so entertaining to fans.
People take many different approaches to picking their bracket. Whether it is based on statistics, rankings, favorite mascots, or going based on what a friend might suggest. However the best way to go, might actually be to do it randomly because you may have a better chance to get more games correctly guessed. May the madness begin!
