BY DC CUEVA
> @DC408dxtr / @DC408dxnow
For sports fans, March sees the one sign that spring has arrived: one of America's biggest sporting events, and the blue-ribbon event in all of collegiate athletics. It is the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament, better known to most of us as March Madness. It is during this one month where one sport captivates America's attention in so many ways. And with the announcement yesterday of this year's field, the 2016 renewal of this great tradition begins tonight.
Newly expanded five years ago, The Big Dance will tip off on this Tuesday evening with the First Four in Dayton, OH, then goes into full gear with the main tournament and the First Round, or the round of 64, two days after the tip this Thursday and Friday, and the Second Round, the round of 32, coming this weekend. Next week sees the Sweet 16 and the Regional Semifinals, followed by the Regional Finals, known as the Elite 8. And it culminates in early April with the Final Four, which this year will take place in Houston, TX, with The National Semifinals will be played at NRG Stadium, followed by the National Championship game two nights later on Monday, April 5th.
In a country as broad as the U.S. and where basketball is the only major team sport that's solely derived and developed in this country, the NCAA Tournament is pure Americana. It's practically the only event of its kind in the world's biggest sports nation that pits teams big and small from every region of the country in a three-week miniseries, played out over 67 acts, early on with as many as four games taking place simultaneously, and culminating in the National title game in front of the largest crowd and biggest TV audience to watch a basketball game all year.
It's the only annual event in U.S. team sports where some of its games are played in the weekday daytime hours, and that only means that for one Thursday & Friday, the nation's work productivity will go down while other workers simply call-in sick to spend an entire day watching college hoops. It's where they and so many others fill out their brackets and play in their own tournament pools to see who can outsmart the others in predicting who wins and puts together the best bracket. And there's the strong fan enthusiasm and passion only college sports can offer.
So many things define this celebrated rite of springtime. There's the great Cinderella stories that sees unheralded teams upset top team after top team and making a deep run in the tournament. There's great performances by players making their mark for their first time on this great stage, as they look to make this a stepping stone towards success in the NBA. And of course, there's nothing like those buzzer beaters that provide indelible moments of joy for the winners and despair for the losers where one shot can change everything when the clock strikes zero.
So many things define this celebrated rite of springtime. There's the great Cinderella stories that sees unheralded teams upset top team after top team and making a deep run in the tournament. There's great performances by players making their mark for their first time on this great stage, as they look to make this a stepping stone towards success in the NBA. And of course, there's nothing like those buzzer beaters that provide indelible moments of joy for the winners and despair for the losers where one shot can change everything when the clock strikes zero.
It's all of these components and so much more that make March Madness one of a kind and something that captivates and galvanizes an entire sports nation every March. It provides for some of the best basketball that's played all year, and has a degree of unpredictability and great thrills that brings in both the passionate basketball fan and casual viewers alike. There's truly nothing like the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship.
The tournament began in 1939 by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, the brainchild of Ohio State coach Harold Olsen. It started with just 8 teams participating and Oregon hoisted the trophy at Madison Square Garden. Afterwards, the tournament would evolve, and the format would expand several fold from only inviting conference champions at the outset, to introducing at-large bids for teams who didn't win their conference title in the '70s. By 1985, the event as most know it now took shape when the field was set at 64 teams as the sport's expansion made it possible. The reintroduction of a play-in game that was used briefly in the '80s expanded the field by one in 2001 to 65, followed a decade later by three additional play-in's, known as the First Four.
And that First Four brings us to the present format. Today, 68 teams qualify for the Tournament, and 32 of the spots in the Big Dance are earned by those who win their conference title. In that instance, this season 31 of them were earned by way of winning their respective conference's postseason tournament; the lone holdout is the Ivy League where until this year, the regular season champion wins the automatic bid, and only if a one-game playoff is necessary if two Ivies share the regular season title (as was the case in 2015, but will adopt a 4-team playoff starting in 2017).
The remaining 36 tournament slots are then allocated to at-large bids, whose fates lie in the hands of the selection committee. That 10-person group consists primarily of conference commissioners and school athletic directors appointed by the NCAA. That selection show that takes place on Sunday evening after all of the conference tournament games have wrapped up is where those who've not won their conference title hold their breath to find out if they're in or not. It always makes for the most intense part of the selection process in seeing who's in and who's out by the skin of their teeth.
For this national tournament, it is held in cities all over the country in front of sellout arenas. The event is divided into four regions of at least sixteen teams each, but since 2011 four teams have been added by the Committee's decision. They are charged with the duty of making each of the four regions as close as possible in terms of overall quality of teams from wherever they come from. The names vary year to year, roughly referencing to the locations of the four cities hosting the regional finals, so East, South, Midwest and West are usually the ones used nowadays.
The remaining 36 tournament slots are then allocated to at-large bids, whose fates lie in the hands of the selection committee. That 10-person group consists primarily of conference commissioners and school athletic directors appointed by the NCAA. That selection show that takes place on Sunday evening after all of the conference tournament games have wrapped up is where those who've not won their conference title hold their breath to find out if they're in or not. It always makes for the most intense part of the selection process in seeing who's in and who's out by the skin of their teeth.
For this national tournament, it is held in cities all over the country in front of sellout arenas. The event is divided into four regions of at least sixteen teams each, but since 2011 four teams have been added by the Committee's decision. They are charged with the duty of making each of the four regions as close as possible in terms of overall quality of teams from wherever they come from. The names vary year to year, roughly referencing to the locations of the four cities hosting the regional finals, so East, South, Midwest and West are usually the ones used nowadays.
The entire roll-call of the schools who play men's basketball in NCAA Division I at the start of the 2015-16 season number at 351, divided among 32 total conferences. Except for that small handful of teams who can't compete due to academic ineligibility or any other reason, all of those schools have an eye towards, theoretically, going all the way to a tournament berth, though most of the attention is on the power conferences with more financial clout than others. And most of the at-large spots are given to teams from the ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC and other top conferences.
And of course, as this is a single-elimination tournament, there's always the chance an unheralded team outside of those conferences could pull off a shocking upset, which can bestow them the title "Cinderella" team. Legendary North Carolina head coach Dean Smith agrees that the one & done nature of this tournament is brutal, but gives it the unique allure, and teams who can pull it all off - from Villanova and George Mason to VCU and Florida Gulf Coast University - can become legends with a monumental win.
And of course, as this is a single-elimination tournament, there's always the chance an unheralded team outside of those conferences could pull off a shocking upset, which can bestow them the title "Cinderella" team. Legendary North Carolina head coach Dean Smith agrees that the one & done nature of this tournament is brutal, but gives it the unique allure, and teams who can pull it all off - from Villanova and George Mason to VCU and Florida Gulf Coast University - can become legends with a monumental win.
THE SELECTION PROCESS
The process of selecting the teams who make the NCAA Tournament is always the most scrutinized part of the whole process, all before the action on the court begins Tournament Week. The ten-member committee spends all Selection Weekend discussing who goes in, and not select those teams but also meet year-round to discuss the tournament and its administration, evaluate teams, assign game officials and determine future sites. And when there's a potential conflict of interest, committee members are not present when their own school or conference is being discussed.
When selection time comes around, the committee must first decide which teams will participate in the Big Dance, and their job is made easy by the 32 teams who gain automatic bids by virtue of winning either their conference tournament, or the aforementioned Ivy League regular season title. Therefore, they only select 36 teams who gain entry through an at-large bid, and they and the 32 conference champs are then seeded 1-68 before being decided among the regions. The top four teams overall are distributed among the four regions, and are awarded a #1 seed in the region they're playing in; the top team overall is given the overall #1 seed. The next four ranked teams are given a #2 ranking in their region, and it continues all the way down the line to the #16 seeds, using a method called an "S-curve."
Each member of the men's selection committee looks over all the information they can get - review and comparison of data, and discussions with coaches, athletic directors and commissioners - to get through three phases: selecting the 36 best at-large teams, combining them with the 32 automatic bid teams to seed the entire field, and then place them into the bracket. Of course, those are three simple things any panel can do, but no process is as heavily scrutinized as that during championship week when all the conference tournament games are taking place.
The resources the members have are vast encompassing observing, consulting and data. They include watching games, conference calls, regional rankings of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, box scores and results against common opponents. But it's the advanced analytics that make all the difference: the strength of schedule among the overall and non-conference teams, the quality of wins and losses, their road record, and player & coach availability, along with other metrics, that will often make the difference in which bubble teams make the draw.
And there's those three letters: RPI, which means Rating Percentage Index. This is the most important of those elements used to help determine a team's probabilities of joining the Dance. This is the equation of a team's Winning Percentage, plus the Opponent's Winning Percentage, plus the Other Opponents' Winning Percentage. The first and third equations are multiplied by .25, while the second is multiplied by .50. And since 2004, a home win or road loss counts .06 for or against, while a road win or home loss is .14 for or against; a neutral win or loss is just a full 1 point for or against.
There are various manners when it comes to the actual selection of the at-large teams too many to mention here. But the committee does whatever it can to achieve and maintain a competitive balance in each region, but also be objective. Thus, as we told you earlier, a member must not be present when the team or conference he represents or has a family member on the team is being discussed, and that he can only ask general questions pertaining to his conference. And since all votes are on secret ballot starting with an initial one on Wednesday and a final one before the bracket is revealed, he also can't vote for a team he represents as an athletic director or commissioner.
Where possible, the selection panel makes sure that when possible, conference teams cannot meet until either the Elite Eight or the Sweet 16 depending upon if they met up to 3 times and that any possible rematches of regular season or previous year's Tournament games are avoided in the First & Second rounds. It's with this in mind that often, one seeded team's line is moved up or down, and could see a 40th overall ranked team be moved from a 10th seed to a 9th or an 11th.
It's after all of this has occurred that the bracket is established, and when the regions are set, the Final Four and the National Semifinal where the champion of the top overall #1 seed's region will go against the winner of the 4th-ranked #1 seed's bracket, and the teams who won the second- and fourth-overall ranked #1 seed's regions square off on that Saturday night.
It's after all of this has occurred that the bracket is established, and when the regions are set, the Final Four and the National Semifinal where the champion of the top overall #1 seed's region will go against the winner of the 4th-ranked #1 seed's bracket, and the teams who won the second- and fourth-overall ranked #1 seed's regions square off on that Saturday night.
ROUNDS AND THE VENUES
Like the grand slam events in tennis, there are seven overall rounds in the NCAA Tournament: the First Four, the First Round, the Second Round, the Regional Semifinals - Sweet Sixteen, the Regional Finals - Elite Eight, the National Semifinals - Final Four" and The National Championship. Of course, it is a single-elimination tournament and it gives both the top programs and those underdog teams an even chance - more on that later.
The First Four (as well as the "play-in" game from 2001-10) takes place in Dayton, OH and sees the four lowest-ranked at-large teams and the bottom four conference champs square off on Tuesday & Wednesday in the first four games of March Madness. Typically, two low-ranked automatic bid teams will square off for a #16 seed and a date with the top regional seed, while two teams who just got in as an at-large entry will face off for an 11th seed berth and a game vs. a #6 on a shorter turnaround than the other teams. And in each First Four year, a winner in Ohio won their next game: VCU in 2011 (went to Final Four), South Florida in 2012, La Salle in 2013 and Tennessee in 2014 went to the Sweet 16, and last year Dayton won at home then won their RD-64 game.In a stretch that sees six straight days and nights of action by the time Sunday night rolls around, The First Round on Thursday and Friday sees all the teams in action in all regions of this round of 64: 16 games each on Thursday and Friday matching #1 with #16, #2 with #15 and so on until we reach 32 teams come late Friday night after the last game of the quadruple-header's have wrapped up in the eight venues. The Second Round takes place over the weekend with 16 more games on the docket, where Thursday's winners play on Saturday, and Friday's victors tip off on Sunday. And when the dust settles, 16 teams are left in the draw...thus, we call them the "Sweet Sixteen."
Then, after some three to four days of rest and travel, the teams are tipping off week two in a different city, and it's the Regional Semifinals. Four of those take place on Thursday and then four more on Friday, which will take us to 8 teams remaining come late Friday night. And it's there that we have the Elite Eight, and the Regional Finals on Saturday and Sunday determine who goes to the final destination. By a week from Sunday night, we'll know who those regional champions are, and of course they're known as The Final Four.
Many basketball fans describe the last Saturday of this miniseries as the best day of basketball all year, and with good reason. The four teams that are left play in a National Semifinal doubleheader, and the past couple years have seen all four #1 seeds make it to this penultimate stage...the best it can get in college basketball. And of course, the two teams who win on Saturday have one more game to play, on Monday night, with everything on the line. And the team who's victorious has the honor of cutting down the nets and hoisting the trophy as National Champion.
As far as the places where the games are played, the 13 Tournament venues are spread out all over the U.S. All sites are nominally neutral, and (with exceptions) teams can't play tournament games on their home court, or any arena where they have played four or more regular season games, until the Final Four. The only exception to this regulation is the University of Dayton, who have hosted the First Four and the predecessor play-in game since 2001 and last year played in that first foursome.
There is a possibility a home court advantage can be given to a team if they make it to the Final Four, but nowadays that takes place in an NFL-sized stadium and larger than a typical arena. Ask Butler when they almost took down Duke in 2010 in Indianapolis. It has happened before that, of course, with Louisville winning at Freedom Hall in 1959, then Kentucky, UCLA and North Carolina winning in their home state, and Kansas winning four titles in KC, Missouri, just across the highway.
And along with this, since 2002 a pod system has been in place where each host site is assigned any of four pods consisting of various matchups as a way for teams to limit the amount of early-round travel as possible. One city hosts the #1-#16 and #8-9 games, while another hosts #2-#15 & #7-#10, a third venue hosts #3-#14 & #6-#11 and a fourth site hosts #4-#13 & #5-#12. This replaced an entire regional site system where every team in a region is assigned to that bracket.
So many great venues, big and small, have hosted a Tournament game. But since 1997 every Final Four has been held in domed stadiums with at least 40,000 capacity...thus, NFL or football-style venues have hosted the last act of the college hoops season. Dallas, St. Lois, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Houston, Phoenix and San Antonio are the cities in the current rotation with the available capacity and ability to raise the floor three feet so that 70,000-plus could watch.
BRACKETOLOGY AND POOLS
Come March, one word comes to mind for those who watch college basketball and have pen and paper handy: "brackets." It's a simple tree diagram representing the series of games played in a knockout tournament where one loss means it's all over, and where the single-elimination tournament is the most common and the simplest of these tools. And while they are used in the major American sports and in tennis, it's in the NCAA Tournament that it has its greatest exposure.
The word "Bracket" becomes a key word in pop culture this time of year, and of course millions of Americans - both hardcore fans and non-sports fans - fill out their brackets on Selection Sunday and right up until the opening game. It has also given birth to a term by the name of "Bracketology" as tournament mania sweeps the country every March.
The word "Bracket" becomes a key word in pop culture this time of year, and of course millions of Americans - both hardcore fans and non-sports fans - fill out their brackets on Selection Sunday and right up until the opening game. It has also given birth to a term by the name of "Bracketology" as tournament mania sweeps the country every March.
For those outside that selection room, every year millions of fans - both hardcore and casual - do whatever they can to fill out their brackets in predicting the winners of every game of the NCAA Tournament for both formal contests put out by companies eager to cash in on basketball fever, and informal betting pools among friends, workers and colleagues using printouts they did at home.
There is so much speculation made among fans and organizations in the days leading up to Selection Sunday that there are even senior bracketologists and experts who measure RPI, team rankings and of course give their predictions on who makes the field before the bracket is revealed. A bracketologist uses the NCAA committee's selection process, RPI and a seeding and balancing process to place teams in the four regions, or even pods of who will play in the first week. He also forecasts the four teams he believes are the last four in and the last four teams out, which can change frequently as the conference tournaments play out.
Numerous methods are used to predict bracket winners, including the famous predictions made by the nation's #1 fan, President Obama every year on ESPN. He was outsmarted last year by 2012 opposition leader Mitt Romney who correctly predicted six Elite Eight teams, all of the Final Four, the National Championship matchup, and its winner Duke.
And in a country where sports betting is regulated -- including the issue of whether daily fantasy sports sites are legal that came up last year, March Madness pools are the closest thing you can get to widespread sports gambling as you can get. Private gambling-related contests and pools are held among fans and groups during Tournament time to find out who can predict the field most correctly, which is a pastime during the springtime. And various systems reward points for correct results which increases in the later rounds, and bonus points for upsets.
There are 9.2 quintillion possibilities for the possible winners in a 64-team bracket, which was expanded to 147.57 quintillion chances with the 68-team field. And the holy grail is one to formulate the perfect bracket, which one year had a $1 billion prize funded by Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans for any person who can correctly predict the correct tournament outcome of all 67 games, though no one hit the jackpot.
There is so much speculation made among fans and organizations in the days leading up to Selection Sunday that there are even senior bracketologists and experts who measure RPI, team rankings and of course give their predictions on who makes the field before the bracket is revealed. A bracketologist uses the NCAA committee's selection process, RPI and a seeding and balancing process to place teams in the four regions, or even pods of who will play in the first week. He also forecasts the four teams he believes are the last four in and the last four teams out, which can change frequently as the conference tournaments play out.
Numerous methods are used to predict bracket winners, including the famous predictions made by the nation's #1 fan, President Obama every year on ESPN. He was outsmarted last year by 2012 opposition leader Mitt Romney who correctly predicted six Elite Eight teams, all of the Final Four, the National Championship matchup, and its winner Duke.
And in a country where sports betting is regulated -- including the issue of whether daily fantasy sports sites are legal that came up last year, March Madness pools are the closest thing you can get to widespread sports gambling as you can get. Private gambling-related contests and pools are held among fans and groups during Tournament time to find out who can predict the field most correctly, which is a pastime during the springtime. And various systems reward points for correct results which increases in the later rounds, and bonus points for upsets.
There are 9.2 quintillion possibilities for the possible winners in a 64-team bracket, which was expanded to 147.57 quintillion chances with the 68-team field. And the holy grail is one to formulate the perfect bracket, which one year had a $1 billion prize funded by Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans for any person who can correctly predict the correct tournament outcome of all 67 games, though no one hit the jackpot.
A BIG EVENT IN MANY WAYS
As college basketball has increased its exposure over time, the NCAA Tournament has become a major draw on TV, with broadcasts of the National Championship attracting the biggest audience for a basketball game all year. While NBC televised the tournament in the '60s and '70s including the record audience for Larry Bird and Magic Johnson's first meeting back in 1979, it is at CBS where it has flourished to become a cherished part of the network's sports portfolio. The great moments of 35 years televising this event, the announcers who have called this event over the years, and of course, those two pieces of music in Bob Christianson's theme and "One Shining Moment", have become revered traditions to both fans and to those who work at Black Rock.
March Madness can also owe much of its success to ESPN, whereas college hoops was their first big sport, it gave the event top treatment when it began showing the rarely-televised early rounds of the tournament. With it airing as many as 14 games of the first round in the mid-'80s on what was then a single ESPN network - six back to back on a Thursday or Friday, it also pioneered the "whip-around" format of switching from game to game and showing buzzer-beater after buzzer-beater. The template of what NFL RedZone does best today was cast there in college hoops.
In 2010, CBS asked the company who once tried to take over the network with a takeover bid some 25 years earlier, Turner Broadcasting, to put in a joint bid for TV rights once its present deal was up, and to stave off a hungry ESPN. A year later, the present NCAA March Madness TV coverage began in providing the hoops-hungry audience the first fully-available national broadcast of the event, with every game being shown nationally in their entirety on CBS, TBS, TNT and TruTV. Fans would now treat their remote and mobile devices as their own control room in following that first week of action with games going on simultaneously.
Each March, CBS' college hoops teams join with the Emmy-winning NBA on TNT team to host and call the action. Imagine, a stacked broadcast team with E.J., Kenny and Charles with Jim Nantz, Verne Lundquist, Bill Raftery and their combined all-star team of announcers to bring the biggest event in college sports. And this year in a milestone for a network who entered the sports world as owners of the Atlanta Braves, Turner Sports will televise Final Four weekend and the title game for the first time.
The CBS/Turner deal provides an annual financial windfall for the NCAA in over $500 million a year - 90% of the organization's annual revenue. And as the Div. I Men's Basketball Tournament is the only championship event that the NCAA doesn't keep the profits, in turn the annual revenue from this media rights deal numbering in the billions are distributed among the Div. I hoops programs and conferences in helping to fund athletic programs, athletic scholarships and the like, especially sports that don't have the amount of huge year-round attention as basketball and football.
The CBS/Turner deal provides an annual financial windfall for the NCAA in over $500 million a year - 90% of the organization's annual revenue. And as the Div. I Men's Basketball Tournament is the only championship event that the NCAA doesn't keep the profits, in turn the annual revenue from this media rights deal numbering in the billions are distributed among the Div. I hoops programs and conferences in helping to fund athletic programs, athletic scholarships and the like, especially sports that don't have the amount of huge year-round attention as basketball and football.
The massive TV exposure also brings about the huge interest in basketball and college athletics, and how this can boost chances of going to the NBA. With this tournament taking place before the NBA Playoffs, this gives a huge platform for executives and scouts to watch these players and see who could be draft material. If a player outperforms expectations, then he's expected to go to the big time. So all eyes of basketball fans are on this crucial month.
Of course, except for major golf and tennis tournaments, the NCAA Tournament is the only annual, major American sports event held in the weekday daytime. So huge a fascination has the NCAA Tournament and the American public that the behavior of employers changes considerably with the amount of sick days used being increased considerably among workers who are hoops fans, while those who do report to work extend their lunch breaks and reschedule conference calls to watch the event.
The terms used to describe the NCAA Tournament are numerous, and the first two are actually trademarks. The term "March Madness" was first used in the Midwest to describe postseason basketball, and in the '80s, CBS broadcaster Brent Musberger began to use the term to describe the NCAA tournament at the same time the Seattle host committee put together a March Madness celebration when it hosted it in 1984. The term "Sweet Sixteen" for the regional semis also doubles as the title of the high school hoops tournament in another college hoops hotbed, Kentucky, for the Kentucky High School Athletic Association's basketball tournament; the term is licensed to the NCAA. And the words "Final Four" was first coined in 1975 in a college basketball guide and became a trademark a few years later.
THAT CHAMPIONSHIP FEELING
And of course, there's those three crowning moments that take place on that first Monday in April when the National Championship game ends.● First, there's the prize that programs dream of in the fall: the NCAA National Championship trophy, a wood and crystal-hybrid trophy that's plated in gold, plus commemorative gold championship rings for each member of the team. That's only part of the trophy case as the NCAA awards a silver runner-up trophy for the finalist and bronze trophies to the teams who win their Regional Championship. And for the victors, there's a marble & crystal trophy by the National Association of Basketball Coaches and a Most Outstanding Player award for the best player in the tournament.
● Second, there's the ritual of the winning team cutting down the nets at the end of the regional finals and the national championship game. A tradition that started when NC State coach Everett Case was hoisted on the shoulders of his players after they won their conference title in 1947, this ritual begins with the seniors moving down by classes in each player cutting a single strand off of each net, and ending with the head coach cutting the last strand connecting the net to the hoop and claiming the net itself.
● And third, after the cutting of the nets the championship team and the crowd turn their attention to the stadium's large screens for what's been the last element of CBS' NCAA tournament coverage since 1987. "One Shining Moment" was originally composed for Super Bowl XXI, but when it was moved to that year's NCAA tournament it has become a ritual ever since as the song provides the soundtrack to an end montage of the year's biggest moments of the biggest event in college hoops. An unknown club singer from Detroit, David Barrett, gave a tape to CBS of a song of an athlete's feeling of accomplishment and timelessness when he's playing. Now it's a time-honored tradition.
The world of college sports has certainly changed in the course of the past decade. An unprecedented period of upheaval has seen colleges sacrifice tradition for dollars in moving from one conference to another as often as players jumping to the pros early. And both the NCAA and colleges have been in the news lately for reasons that don't have to do with action on the court or on the field. But amidst the chaos of recent years, one tradition has stood the test of time since 1939 and has flourished since: a tournament that began as a mere championship game at Madison Square Garden in New York, and has grown to become the biggest game in college sports.
From Cinderellas to upsets, buzzer-beaters to incredible moments, the NCAA Tournament has become synonymous with springtime and basketball at its best. For 21 days with 68 teams and 67 games, it provides us with tremendous thrills and excitement that only collegiate athletics can provide. And now, after a season of unpredictability in college basketball, as well as - yes - what happened with Selection Sunday over the weekend, the attention now turns to the beginning of the Road to the Final Four that starts tonight in Dayton, Ohio and will conclude a fortnight from now in Houston, Texas where one team will reign supreme as national champions. Let the madness begin.
From Cinderellas to upsets, buzzer-beaters to incredible moments, the NCAA Tournament has become synonymous with springtime and basketball at its best. For 21 days with 68 teams and 67 games, it provides us with tremendous thrills and excitement that only collegiate athletics can provide. And now, after a season of unpredictability in college basketball, as well as - yes - what happened with Selection Sunday over the weekend, the attention now turns to the beginning of the Road to the Final Four that starts tonight in Dayton, Ohio and will conclude a fortnight from now in Houston, Texas where one team will reign supreme as national champions. Let the madness begin.
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Make sure to follow my secondary Twitter hub dedicated solely to event coverage, DCNOW at @DC408DxNow, for live tweets of the biggest event in college sports, starting this evening with the First Four in Dayton. We'll continue with live tweets and twitter recaps of all rounds of the tournament on each day of play, and of course it will culminate April 5th with the National Championship in Houston.
Plus for MTV fans, DCBLOG will offer extensive coverage of the upcoming season of Real World: Go Big or Go Home from Las Vegas, which will begin its newest season this Thursday following the First Round of the NCAA Tournament. This site will offer exclusive social play-by-play diaries, episode recaps and more covering the new season and the MTV Trifecta. And you can follow me on Twitter & Instagram @DC408Dxtr, and Tumblr at dc408dxtr.tumblr.com, among other platforms.
Thanks for reading this DC Sports look at the NCAA Basketball Championship, and until we meet again, good luck to your favorite team and enjoy March Madness.
- I AM DC
Bibliography: NCAA.org, Wikipedia, Basketball for Dummies
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