A tradition of eight decades, four regions, 68 teams before the first match: this is how the great university tournament is made up and played.
Like every year, March arrives and madness breaks out in American basketball: it's time for the university tournament, the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. March Madness: March Madness. One of the milestones of the sports calendar in the United States and a media explosion without comparison in basketball; Nothing, not even the NBA Finals, come close to what the college tournament generates, in every way. in the USA. Their great rivalries are in the very essence of their sport and in the lives of their citizens. Heroes, villains, comebacks, disasters, scripts more typical of Hollywood, bets that go through the air, stories that monopolize the media... there's a reason it's called March Madness.
The tournament chooses, each year, the university basketball champion and, after the season, 68 teams from the country's highest category, Division I of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), enter it. Its history, although its format and layout has evolved over the years, dates back to 1939 and is due to the idea of several coaches, most notably Harold Olsen of Ohio State. Their record is dominated by UCLA (11 titles), followed by Kentucky (8), North Carolina (6) and Duke and Indiana (5). But since it expanded to 64 teams in 1985, Duke has been the great dominator (its 5 have come in that stretch) ahead of North Carolina (4). Two historic rivals from Carolina, face to face. Since 2011, all matches can be seen live anywhere in the world, and since 1969 the tournament has been televised. Now the rights in the US belong to TNT, CBS, TBS and TruTv.
Four regions competing all or nothing
The tournament is organized by rounds and in direct elimination matches. The table (the famous bracket on which bets are made in the United States) is divided (with this nomenclature since 2007) into four regions: East, South, West and Midwest (East, South, West and Midwest). From each region, with the matches in preselected neutral venues, a regional champion emerges who advances to the Final Four, the final four: the semifinals and final from which the champion emerges and which is celebrated, as a grand culmination, the first finish week of April.
The structure of the tournament is as follows: a first round (First Four) that distributes the last four places to advance to the 64 of the final tournament and three weeks with five more rounds: first round (first), round of 32 (second ), sweet 16 (regional semifinals), elite 8 (regional finals) and the semifinals and final that make up the Final Four, on Saturday and Monday of the final weekend. All matches, we must insist because that is the true essence of the tournament, the fuel of madness, are direct elimination: whoever wins advances, whoever loses goes home.
The 68 spots are distributed as follows: 32 are for the champions of the 32 Division I Conferences. They automatically receive a spot in the tournament. The other 36 are given by invitation by an NCAA selection committee; who makes his announcement in a major televised event (Selection Sunday). The teams are divided by regions: in the final table after the first four matches, 16 in each of the four. In them, they are placed by ranking, from 1 to 16. And this is how they play: 1 against 16, 2 against 15... in such a way that the two best from each region can only face each other in the regional final, with a ticket to the Final Four at stake.
The NCAA selection committee prepares the ranking of the 68 teams, from 1 to 68, and from there the bracket is composed: the first four are distributed among the four regions as seeds of each of them, the four Next will be the four numbers two and so on. Once the table is established, the madness begins, the three weeks in which basketball takes over the United States and which ends with a university crowned as the great queen of the country.
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