
March is here. And with the Madness beginning, college basketball is rushing to the forefront of many people’s minds. Wallethub estimates that corporate losses due to unproductive workers during March Madness is about $1.9 billion.
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Here are 17 numbers to know about March:
On March 14, the first game of the NCAA tournament (a First Four game in Dayton, Ohio) tips off. The last game will be played on April 3. That means you have only 20 days to soak in a ridiculous amount of crazy college basketball action. And, that ladies and gentlemen, is why it's called March Madness. Thirty-two teams in the field are decided before Selection Sunday by virtue of winning their conference tournament. It's up to the selection committee to decide where those teams are seeded, where they will play and who will be the 36 other teams -- the at-large teams -- that will join them.SEE WHO IS IN: Conference Tournament Schedule
The make-up of the tournament rests in just 10 peoples’ hands. They are responsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the entire field. Right now, everyone on the committee serves as an athletic director for a DI school, which is pretty common. The standard protocol to be selected involves a school and/or conference administrator being nominated by their conference. The committee memebers serve five-year terms and should represent a cross-section of the Division I membership. Oregon defeated Ohio State, 46-33, to win the very first NCAA tournament in Evanston, Ill. Only six other teams participated.CBS continues to broadcast the games today. In April 2010, the NCAA, CBS and Turner Sports agreed to a television rights deal that was recently extended to last until 2032, meaning you will find all the tournament games you want to watch on CBS, TNT, TruTV and TBS for a long, long time.
Jeffrey Bergen, a professor of mathematics at DePaul University, says that the chances of someone filling out a perfect bracket is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 when just guessing. That number drops to 1 in 128 billion when adding in a little basketball knowledge. Either way, your chances don’t look good.
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Villanova, Duke, UConn, Louisville, Kentucky, UNC, Kansas, Florida, Syracuse, Maryland ... the list goes on. The wild part? The tournament has been going on for almost 80 years, meaning some of these 35 programs have won the title multiple times.
Sportscaster Brent Musburger gets credit for uttering the term during his coverage of the games.
During the 2015 tournament, 80.7 million live videos were streamed, totaling 17.8 million hours, through NCAA March Madness Live.
From 2000 on, 17 NCAA tournament champions have been crowned. The smallest margin of victory came last year and in 2003, when Villanova and Syracuse won by only three points. The largest? That was 2009, when North Carolina dropped Michigan State, 89-72.
Michigan’s all-time scoring leader, Glen Rice, holds the record for points scored during a single tournament run, which he set in 1989. Christian Laettner, from Duke, holds the record for points during tournament games in a college career, posting 407 during 23 games.
While you may find it fun to choose a No. 16 see team over a No. 1 seed, you should be prepared to be wrong. Yes, it could happen one day. It just never has.
Joe B. Hall. Bob Knight. Dean Smith. Only these three men can say they have claimed a title both as a coach and as a player. Hall won both with Kentucky. Knight played at Ohio State then coached at Indiana, and Smith played with Kansas and coached North Carolina.
In 1985, Villanova made history as the lowest-seeded team to win a tournament. It was seeded No. 8 but went on to down Georgetown, 66-64, in the final game.
UNC, Kansas, Memphis and UCLA, all seeded No. 1, made it to the Final Four, the only time in tournament history that all top seeds made it through.
UCLA has 11 national titles to its name. Ten of those wins came between 1964 and 1975 when Bruins’ legend John Wooden led the program.
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In 2011, Jim Calhoun led UConn to the national title at the age of 68. If Mike Krzyzewski was to lead Duke to the title this year, he would set a new record. He's 70.
Note: Facts and figures were pulled from NCAA, Fox Sports, CNN and The Best Schools Magazine.