March Madness Bracket
NCAA Tournament Matchups & Odds
March Madness Bracket
The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament is a tournament that handles 68 teams in a single-elimination event. These teams compete in seven rounds for the national championship. The first NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament was held in the year 1939 and every year afterwards until the pandemic hit the 2019-20 NCAAB season. Then, it picked up again after everything had settled down.
The tournament handles 68 teams in a single-elimination event. These teams compete in seven rounds for the national championship.
There are two ways in which the teams are chosen:
- For example, 32 of the 68 teams are picked using “automatic bids”, which means these teams won their conference’s tournament and automatically got into the March Madness tournament.
- The other 36 are taken in as “at-large” bids, and will be chosen by the NCAA Selection Committee as teams which almost made it automatically but didn’t, and still are worthy of a shot at the madness.
Once the teams are whittled down to 68, each team is assigned a seed and assigned one of four regions. This helps define what will be their first-round matchups and how their routes towards the championship are going to take place.
Four of the initial chosen 68 teams are eliminated in the opening round or First Four round of the tournament, which leaves us with 64 teams for the first round. Those 64 teams are then split up into four regions of 16 teams each; each team gets ranked 1 through 16, and that rank is the team’s seed.
There are two ways in which a team can make one of the 68 positions for the March Madness NCAAB tournament. All 32 Division I conferences get an automatic bid that they have to award to the team that wont the postseason conference tournament. These teams are known to be “automatic qualifiers”.
The second stance for getting invited to form part of the NCAAB tournament is an at-large bid. The selection committee convenes on Selection Sunday and decides which 36 teams that are not automatic qualifiers deserve to get the invite to play in the tourney.
March Madness Round
Selection Sunday is when the Selection Committee reveals the full NCAA tournament bracket. The 68 teams are selected by means of Automatic Bid Qualifiers, and At-Large Bids, and then get their seeds.
On this day, those 68 teams are ranked based on how well they played in the regular season.
Afterwards, the opening round of the tournament, known as the First Four, is where the first four teams of those 68 will be eliminated, leaving just 64. In this round, the eight teams who play are: the worst at-large bids compete against the worst automatic bids.
From the remaining 64 teams, the tournament is then split into four different regions of 16 teams each. These regions are East, West, South and Midwest. Within these regions, the teams get ranked from 1-16, and this will be each team’s seed, the No.1 seed being the best and the No.16 seed being the worst.
The No.1 seeded teams for each of the regions play their own region’s No.16 team; the next-highest team will play the next-lowest, and so forth. The teams that lose are out.
The 32 teams left will then play 16 brackets; the winners of each NCAA bracket move on to the next round and the losers are again eliminated.
This third round -also known as Sweet 16- will have the 16 teams remaining from the previous round pitted against each other. In other words, those teams will get set up to play against other teams within their own regional division. They will be divided into East, West, South, and Midwest regions. The losers get eliminated and the 8 winners move on to the next round.
This round will have eight winners from the previous round battling it out, to leave four.
Here we will only have four teams fighting it out; they are known as the Final Four. Only two will remain and move on to the Championship game.
