For many sports fans, March is the best month of the year and this is because of March Madness. March Madness is the playoffs or postseason for college basketball and it consists of 68 teams.

 Teams are selected differently. All 32 D1 conferences, which is the best division, automatically win a bid, so if you win the end-of-season conference championship in Division 1, you are an automatic qualifier for the tournament. 

The second way to get into the conference is by being selected by the selection committee. After all of the conference tournament and season games have been played, they determine who is worthy to compete in march madness and they then release the other 36 teams on Selection Sunday. They choose who can make this off of power rankings, they determine power rankings by the teams you have beaten and lost too.  

Each team that makes it to the March Madness tournament gets their conference a unit; a unit is money from March Madness that is paid to the conference over the next six years and you get a unit for each game you play in. A unit is worth $338,887, so after six years, conferences will receive over two million dollars. 

There are always favorites to win march madness like Duke, Gonzaga, North Carolina and Vilanova. This years favorites to win are Houston, Kansas, Alabama and Purdue. One of the greatest traditions is making brackets to try and predict all of the games to have a perfect bracket. No one has ever had a perfect bracket because the odds of getting a perfect bracket are one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.  The closest anyone has ever been was a neuropyschologist from Columbus, Ohio. He had picked the first 49 games correct to get him seven games away from a perfect bracket before he picked wrong.

Winning March Madness is one of the All-Time achievements you can win in sports. March Madness is full of upsets, underdogs and best of all, Cinderella stories of small schools beating big schools to continue on the tournament. The All-time great coaches have won a national championship. 

“If you win a national championship, or you win two, people think you have not only seen the holy grail but have embraced it. Basically, I do what a lot of people do, but I’ve been able to win,” Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski said.

“Somebody asked me – you know. How come it took you so long to win a national championship? And I said ‘I’m a slow learner, but you notice when I Iearn something I have it down pretty good,” Former Indiana basketball coach John Wooden said.