It's March. Selection Sunday will be here and 68 teams will play for an NCAA national championship. There are 68 schools that are admitted into the NCAA tournament. 64 if you don't count play-in games. The bracket will be released by the committee on Selection Sunday and most of America will fill out their bracket.
The odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket can be as low as 1 in 9.2 quintillions.
Even if you don't like sports or actively watch them, you will probably fill out a bracket despite the odds. Even if you yourself don't fill out a bracket, you will see them and see your friends and family and coworkers filling out theirs.
You will likely see people checking scores discreetly on their phone. You will see basketball on the TV at every restaurant you go to. The paper will be covered in scores. Your twitter feed will be jam packed with videos of amazing plays and final scores. The United States will become basketball crazy for a month. And it is glorious.
Whether you like basketball or not, the act of filling out that bracket and seeing how you do whether you guessed on every game or chose for which team had the coolest mascot, it's fun. You get involved with friends, coworkers, acquaintances, family and try and beat them all.
You can fill out a lot of brackets or just one. You can turn it into your work contest or have a bet on the side with your friends or turn it into the ESPN tournament bracket challenge and maybe win a couple million dollars.
The chances aren't good that you'll actually win any money or beat out your friends but there is something so fun about filing out that bracket and watching the games. You become a fan of one team for 40 minutes of basketball. You would give anything for them to win just so your bracket stays alive a little bit longer.
You don't even have to watch the games if you don't want to. You can just check scores. You can just hear from your friends how your bracket ended up doing.
The tournament is single elimination. The stakes are high. The thrill that comes with watching these teams either make their dream come true or watching a nightmare play out as seniors play their final game falling short of their goal is the reason that over 70 million brackets are filled out every year.
There are dramatic finishes, crazy buzzer-beaters, blow outs, bad calls, Cinderella stories, and the one shining moment at the end where one team stands above them all. March Madness is exactly what it says it is.
So prepare your bracket, make your choices, and sit back and enjoy. Let the madness take over and enjoy. It will go by fast and you'll have to wait another year to get another chance to fill out a bracket!
