As the college basketball regular season wraps up, the excitement shifts to March Madness, the 68-team, single-elimination tournament that grips the country every spring. The first four games start on March 18 and stretches over 18 days of intense action, with the championship game set for April 5.
Every weekend brings two rounds of high-stakes matchups, where a single loss means the end of the road. By the final buzzer, only one team will stand as the national champion, securing a place in college basketball history.
March Madness isn’t just about basketball — it’s a full-blown cultural event. More people tune in for the tournament each year than even the NBA Finals. The thrilling upsets, last-second shots and Cinderella stories keep fans hooked, but the real draw for many is filling out their own March Madness Brackets. Millions of people try to predict the outcome of every game, competing for prizes and bragging rights in office pools and online contests.
The numbers behind the madness are staggering. Each year, an estimated 60 to 100 million brackets are filled out, and over $2.72 billion was wagered on last year’s tournament alone — $1.33 billion more than the Super Bowl.
But creating a perfect bracket is nearly impossible. Mathematicians put the odds at around one in 9.2 quintillion, that’s 9.2 followed by 18 zeros. The closest anyone has come was in 2019, when Gregg Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Ohio, correctly picked the first 49 games before his streak finally ended.
“I have done many March Madness brackets before, it has given me a whole new light on college basketball. This crazy tournament with insane endings to every game played allows underdogs throughout the years to sneak through some of the biggest teams and causes major upsets for everyone’s brackets,” senior Jayshon Limar said.
What makes March Madness so special is its unpredictability. A top seed can go down to an underdog in the blink of an eye, and a single buzzer-beater can change the entire tournament.
That mix of drama, chaos, and high stakes keeps fans coming back every year. March Madness isn’t just a basketball tournament — it’s a national obsession where anything can happen and often does.
