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Issue date: 3/31/06 Section: Features

Spring is here and while nature has been blossoming over the past several weeks, many people have been parked in front of their TVs, watching nothing but basketball.

 

While birds have been chirping, buzzers have been buzzing; while flowers have been blooming, people have been regressing into their homes, bars and arenas to catch some of the action.

 

"March Madness is the best time of the year," said Ty Walden, sophomore. "It's better than Christmas. We get to watch six games of basketball in two days."

 

March Madness has taken over many people lives, at least for a few weeks.

 

Sixty-five teams compete to be the best in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Basketball Tournament. It's filled with last-second, buzzer- beating winning baskets and the agony of missing the shot, losing and going home.

 

"Basketball is a game of ups and downs," said Tanner Bryant, senior. "You can have an 18-point lead and it won't matter when it comes down to the last minute."

 

Today, March Madness is known all over America for the NCAA tournament, but it did not start out that way. Henry V. Porter, an Illinois-based reporter, coined the phrase in 1939. Porter wrote an article for the Illinois Interscholastic magazine to describe another basketball tournament, the Illinois High School Association Tournament. March Madness was not used until 1982 to describe the NCAA tournament when CBS reporter Brent Musburger used the catchy phrase.

After a court battle over ownership of the phrase, March Madness is co-owned by the NCAA and the IHSA through the March Madness Athletic Association.

 

To be part of the Madness, colleges must fall under the Division I as per NCAA guidelines-1,006 lucky schools fall under this category. Division I schools must sponsor seven sports for men and seven sports for women (or six for men and eight for women), with two team sports for each gender. Men and women's basketball must play all but two of their games against other

Division I teams and men must play one third of their games in their home arena.

 

NCAA Division I has 327 teams, with one common goal-to win the national championship. Only 65 men's teams and 64 women's teams will be invited to compete for the championship. Invitations are selected by a committee, who meet between the Thursday and Sunday before the invitations which are announced on, you guessed it, "Selection Sunday."

 

Thirty-one teams are automatically selected to go to the championship-it is their reward for winning their conference. The remaining invitations (34 for men, 33 for women) are determined by the committee. They take into account a school's Rating Percentage Index (RPI), ranking in national polls, conference record, road record, wins versus ranked opponents and how a team finishes the regular season.

 

When NCAA officials got together to create the National Tournament, they wanted to remind fans that it was springtime and they coined the terms "seeds" and "pods". Okay-maybe not, but those terms really do exist in the world of March Madness.

 

Seeds refer to the placement of a team in one of four regions, and pods refer to the method of grouping seeds at particular first-round and second-round sites.

 

The same committee that invited teams to the tournament also select how teams are seeded and where they play. The teams are divided into four geographical regions; there are 16 teams in each region (one of the men's regions will have 17 teams). The teams are each given a seed number-the lower the number, the better the team. 

 

Typically, seeds with a number of one through eight have had their fair share of championship wins- but not this year.

 

This year's 11-seed Cinderella team, GeorgeMasonUniversity, is competing against three-seed University of Florida.

 

"It's been a crazy March Madness," said Reggie Ham, junior. "Kinda a Cinderella story with George Mason (University) - they've never won an NCAA game ever and now they're in the Final Four. I can't believe it."

 

After the committee assigns all of the seeds, it assigns the top four teams to compete against a team that is closest to it, no matter where the team might play next. Each week teams play at a different site. There are eight sites for the first and second rounds. Teams are placed at these sites in groups of four, which comprises a pod, and there are two pods at each site. For each region, there are four pods. One pod includes seeds 1, 16, 8, and 9. A second pod includes seeds 4, 13, 5, 12. The third pod includes seeds 2, 15, 7, 10. The fourth pod includes seeds 3, 14, 6, and 11.

 

The tournament is usually played over a three-week period beginning the third week of March.

After the first game is played, and the first team is eliminated, the real action begins. Only after two days of playing the 64 teams are cut down to 16, also known as the "Sweet Sixteen." After a four-day break, the players take to the court again, and are cut from 16 to 4-the Final Four.

In the Final Four round, or semi-final round, two games of basketball decide who stays in the game and who goes home. The men's game is played on Saturday and the women's game is played on Sunday. The winners of the two games face each other the subsequent Monday for the championship game.

 

Source: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/march-madness.htm

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