By Claire Garceau

In the college basketball world, March Madness is an extremely important event. March Madness is a single elimination tournament consisting of 68 teams with seven rounds. Teams are given rankings based on regular season records called a seed. Along with March Madness comes the brackets. Celebrities do them, athletes do them, many people compete to try and have the perfect bracket. The chances of a perfect bracket are about one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Warren Buffet has promised the perfect bracket 1 million dollars a year for the rest of the winner’s life. But how do you even come close to the perfect bracket? It’s nearly impossible, but many have found ways to come as close as possible. 

  1. Articles. This one might seem simple but there are so many different articles to research. The best way to research is ESPN. Their articles are great guides. I usually research Max Kellerman’s bracket. Simply searching “March Madness Bracket guide” will give you good information. “Good information” is simply deemed by percentages, math and your gut feeling. 
  2. Believe in the underdogs. Oftentimes in March Madness there are “Cinderella runs”. This is when teams who fly under the radar or are unlikely to win go far. For example, in 2018, Loyola was the Cinderella team of the year. They were the 11th seed in their conference and went all the way to the final 4. This year 16 seed FDU beat 1 seed Purdue in a major upset.
  3. Watch the games. Watching a whole basketball game can be a little boring if you’re not totally interested or already know the outcome. Usually what I do is search “(Team Name) Offensive Highlights” or “(Team Name) Defensive Highlights”. I go through and look where they succeed and where they struggle and compare their successes and struggles to the team they’ll be matched up against. 
  4. Predicting the final score of the championship game. It’s hard to get this perfect but you can usually guess pretty close by doing two things. Look up “Scores of the last 5 March Madness championships” and base it off that. Use your gut feeling and guess in the ballpark of those scores. For example, last year it was 69-72 so this year you could guess around 61-68. I like to guess a little higher than the year before. 

This March Madness, the UConn Huskies won the men’s bracket and the LSU Tigers won the women’s bracket. There was a lot of controversy around the women’s tournament as it was the most watched game in women’s college basketball with nearly 10 million viewers. Many believed the referees were biased and caused Iowa to lose the game. There was also controversy over the heated arguments between players Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Caitlin kept her composure while Angel Reese decided to be a sore winner. UConn vs. SDSU on the other hand was fairly boring, as there was little to no drama and UConn won by nearly 20 points. UConn was a 4 seed and SDSU was a 5th seed. This is slightly surprising, as those are lower ranked teams.