The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, also branded and known as NCAA March Madness, is a single-elimination championship played each spring at the USA, currently comprising 64 college basketball teams in the Division I level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), to determine the national championship. The National Association of Basketball Coaches created in 1939 the tournament, and has been the idea of Ohio State coach Harold Olsen. [1] Played during March, it has become one of the most famous annual sporting events in the USA. [citation needed]
The championship teams comprise champions from 32 Division I conferences (which get automatic bids), and 36 teams that are awarded at-large berths. These”at-large” teams are chosen by an NCAA selection committee, then declared in a nationally televised event on the Sunday preceding the”First Four” play-in games, currently held in Dayton, Ohio, and dubbed Choice Sunday. The 68 teams are divided into four regions and organized to some single-elimination”bracket”, which pre-determines, when a team wins a game, which team it will face . Each group is”seeded”, or ranked, within its region from 1 to 16. At neutral sites across the USA, the championship occurs during the course of three weekends, after the First Four. Teams, seeded by rank, proceed through a single-game removal bracket beginning with a”first four” consisting of 8 low-seeded teams playing 4 matches for a position in the first round the Tuesday and Wednesday prior to the first round starts, a primary round comprising 64 teams playing 32 games within the span of a week, the”Sweet Sixteen” and”Elite Eight” rounds another weekend and week, respectively, and — to the final weekend of the championship — that the”Final Four” round. The Final Four is usually played during the first weekend of April. These four groups, one from every region (East, South, Midwest, and West), compete in a preselected place for the national championship.
The tournament has been televised since 1969. [2] Currently, the games are broadcast by CBS, TBS, TNT, and truTV under the trade-name NCAA March Madness. Since 2011, all games are available for viewing nationwide and globally. As television coverage has grown, so too has the popularity of the tournament. Currently, millions of Americans fill out a bracket,[3] attempting to correctly predict the outcome of 63 matches of the championship (not including the First Four matches ).
Together with 11 titles, UCLA has the record for the many NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championships; John Wooden coached UCLA to 10 of its 11 names. The University of Kentucky (UK) is second, with eight national titles. The University of North Carolina is third, with six national titles, and Indiana University and Duke University are tied for fourth with five titles. The University of Connecticut is with four titles. The University of Kansas (KU) & Villanova are tied for 7th with three national titles. Since 1985, once the tournament expanded to 64 teams, Duke has won five championships; North Carolina and UConn have each won four; Kentucky & Villanova have three; Kansas & Florida have 2; and Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Louisville[a], Syracuse, UCLA, UNLV, and Virginia have one.
