This year’s March Madness tournament has finally begun, already stunning both teams and fans with huge upsets. Viewers are on the edge of their seats to see which teams will enter the final four and who will become the 2023 national champion.
What is March Madness?
The NCAA, National Collegiate Athletic Association, Division 1 men’s basketball tournament takes place every March, hence the name “March Madness.” This is where the best of college basketball comes together to compete for the title of national champion. This is a single-elimination tournament starting with 68 teams who compete for seven rounds until one team is left standing as national champions.
How the Teams are Divided
Each team is put into a different region and gets assigned a seed number. The higher the seed number, the less predictable they are to advance, whereas the lower the seed number, the more predictable they are to advance. They are then matched up based on their rankings, so it would start with the team in seed #1 playing the team in seed #16, and then it goes down the line until there is a champion.
Upsets This Season so Far
An upset is when a top-seed team loses to a bottom-seed team. Each team gets seeded based on their records and anticipation of how well they will do. There have already been multiple upsets in the 2023 March Madness tournament. Just yesterday, Princeton, who is seed no. 15, beat Arizona, who is seed no. 2. Another big upset that happened yesterday was Furman’s (seed 13) win against Virginia (seed 4).
Who is Favored to Win the 2023 Men’s March Madness Championship?
Based on brackets, which are bets that people make predicting who will advance in each round, fans are banking on Houston to win the whole thing this year. Die-hard NCAA fans will spend hours, even days, creating the perfect bracket based on stats and who they think will succeed in the tournament. Other people who don’t know as much about basketball will blindly pick their brackets, which sometimes can work out better as you never know what can happen during March Madness.
