John Wooden, the “Wizard of Westwood,” and former head coach at UCLA won ten national championships over a 12 year span, and an NCAA record seven in a row. March is here, and 68 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball teams are seeded and scattered across a bracket set up for only one champion to come out on top. This large tournament takes an entire month to complete and has games played all across the continent. There is only one goal: to cut down the net and hoist the championship trophy.

According to the NCAA’s web site, the first NCAA tournament occurred in 1939, with only eight teams scheduled to a single-elimination battle. Led by head coach Howard Hobson, the Oregon Webfoots took home the title with a 46-33 win over Ohio State University in Evanston, Illinois at Northwestern University’s campus.

With selection day right around the corner, many people wonder exactly how each team earns a spot into the bracket. There are three stages in selecting teams: selecting the 36 best at-large teams, selecting the field of 68 teams, and placing the teams into the championship bracket. The first process takes place before the selection meeting. Each committee member is given an initial ballot containing every eligible Division I team to vote on.

Next, during the seeding process, each member submits a list of the best eight teams from their list of the 36 best at-large teams. The committee then begins ranking each team from one to sixteen and groups them into four regions. The regions determine where the games will be played, not where the teams are from. Eventually, the last four teams will meet in Houston to battle it out in the Final Four before the championship game.

Each and every basketball season builds up the energy and anticipation for the chaos surrounding March Madness. Countless numbers of people do their best to make their own predictions on who will win it all, but the odds of creating a perfect bracket are next to impossible at 1 in 9.2 quintillion. It is hard to know who will be crowned the champion this year, but even with the odds so slim, people are still excited and hopeful.

Junior Kolby Canfield, a member of the Stockbridge varsity basketball team, plans on rooting for Michigan State University, Xavier University, and Duke University this March. “I am going to fill out three brackets.” he said. “I am mostly excited for the upsets and the underdog teams that are not picked to win.”

Your Champions//Uncaged asked students at Stockbridge who they thought would win the national title game. These percentages represent the teams that they want to come out on top.

Michigan State: 62.9%

Led by a trio of senior talent, Tom Izzo and the Spartans of East Lansing hope to improve upon their unexpected, but deserving Final Four appearance last March. They come into the tournament out of the Big Ten Conference, among many other powerful teams.