It’s March Madness Season! And the BDE is hosting our very own March Madness Bracket Challenge!
“What is March Madness exactly?”
Posted by Ije
March Madness, formally known as The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament, is a tournament played each spring in the United States. The tournament features 68 college basketball teams, who play in fast-paced, intense rounds of single-elimination games. Yep, that’s right. Once you lose a game you’re out, and the last team standing standing wins it all. The tournament was created in 1939 by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, and has had an extremely huge influence on American sports culture ever since. In fact, alongside the Super Bowl, it is arguably one of the most famous annual sporting events in the United States.
March Madness wouldn’t be March Madness without its famous Bracket Challenge. Each year millions of Americans fill out brackets in the hopes of winning that $100 bet against a family member, or even better, submitting a perfect bracket online and hitting the jackpot. The American Gaming Association projects that 40 million Americans will fill out more than 70 million brackets this year (that’s a lot of brackets.). But choosing the outcome of the tournament isn’t as easy as it seems. To have a perfect bracket, one must correctly choose the winner of every. single. round. of games in the tournament. And each year, without fail, a buzzer beater or underdog team ruins everyone’s chances of getting it right. For those of us who know nothing about basketball, the odds of randomly filling out a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (that’s quintillion). If you have some prior knowledge about the famous American sport, and make conscious choices in your bracket, you have a much better chance of…wait for it..1 in 772 billion! (lol.)
The GTL student with the most accurate bracket (or who knows, the first perfect bracket ever) will win a sports jersey of their choice, and the runner up will win a sports cap.
Stay tuned for when we announce our first and second place winners in April! May the odds be ever in your favor!!