NCAA bracket university: March Madness explained and our best picking tips

Welcome to March Madness University, where we'll teach you absolutely everything you need to know about the NCAA men's basketball tournament ahead of March.

Here's what we'll cover in this course (click any to jump ahead to that lesson):

1: The tournament itself
2: How to play a bracket game
3: Bracket picking tips
4: March Madness history

We've written dozens of articles on all of these topics, so here we will include short summaries of the most important points, then link out to full articles on each topic for out-of-class reading.

Lesson 1: The tournament itself

What is March Madness?

The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament is a single-elimination tournament of 68 teams that compete in seven rounds for the national championship. The penultimate round is known as the Final Four, when only (you guessed it) four teams are left. The first NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament was in 1939, and it has been held every year since.

How has the tournament changed since 1939?

The tournament had a field of only eight teams in its first year, and expanded multiple times over the next few decades until 1985, when the modern format of a 64-team tournament began. 

How are the teams selected?

There are two ways that a team can earn a bid to the NCAA tournament. The 32 Division I conferences all receive an automatic bid, which they each award to the team that wins the postseason conference tournament. Regardless of how a team performed during the regular season, if they are eligible for postseason play and win their conference tournament, they receive a bid to the NCAA tournament. These teams are known as automatic qualifiers.

The second avenue for an invitation is an at-large bid. The selection committee (more on them in a second) convenes on Selection Sunday, after all regular season and conference tournament games are played, and decides which 36 teams that are not automatic qualifiers have the pedigree to earn an invitation to the tournament.

ADDITIONAL READING: What is the March Madness selection committee?

When is 2019’s March Madness?

Here is the full schedule for 2019's NCAA tournament:

Lesson 2: How to play a bracket game

What is a bracket game?

The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament starts with a bracket of 64 teams. Before the games begin, you can try your hand at predicting the winner for each one of the 63 games. Your methodology is entirely up to you, whether that's taking a deep dive into the statistics, flipping a coin, or having your dog make picks for you. 

Then, sit back and watch the madness unfold as you revel in victory, or witness your bracket get busted before the first weekend.

As the games progress, you’ll get points for every winner you picked correctly. Those points increase every round (games in the second round are worth twice as much as games in the first round, and so on). At the end of the tournament, the player in each group with the most points wins that group.

How to play a March Madness bracket game

You can sign up for the Bracket Challenge Game here.

PLAY the OFFICIAL Bracket Challenge GAME
The challenge is on. Create your groups now.

You'll be notified when the game goes live in March.

Important bracket game dates:

• Today: Sign up!

  • You can sign up for the Bracket Challenge Game right now. Visit this site and enter your email. You’ll receive an email reminder at all important dates, including as soon as brackets go live in March.

• Sunday, March 17: Selection Sunday

  • On this day, the selection committee will reveal the 68 teams that made the tournament’s field and the final bracket. Once that is announced, brackets will open up for picking for the first time.

• Thursday, March 21: First round starts

  • The first games of the tournament’s first round will start on this day. At 12:00 p.m. ET, right before the first games tip off, bracket picking will lock, and you won’t be able to change any picks in your bracket for the remainder of the tournament. Don’t get caught with an incomplete bracket before then.

• Monday, April 8: Championship game

  • The national championship game will be played this night. Once it is over, the tournament will be complete, and the scores for the bracket challenge game will be final. 

Lesson 3: Bracket picking tips

Tips for picking your bracket

Here is a list of suggested reading for how to make the most informed bracket picks:

• How do the preseason Top 25 fare in March Madness? 
• Even unranked teams find success in the NCAA tournament
• How performance in close games affects national championship hopes
• Here's how to pick March Madness upsets, according to the data
• The common traits of a 15-2 upset in March Madness
• Have 1 seed vs. 16 seed games been getting closer?
• Nine years of college basketball data show offense matters more in March
• The best conferences in NCAA tournament play since 1985
• The lesson learned from 34 Final Four teams: Experience matters in March
• How to pick your NCAA tournament bracket based on team mascots
• The best NCAA tournament runs by a First Four team
• Why you should always pick blue and orange teams in the NCAA tournament

What are the odds of a perfect bracket?

That’s tough to say exactly, but we'll get two things out of the way quickly. One, no one has ever filled out a verifiably perfect bracket in the history of the modern NCAA tournament. Two, no one likely ever will, because the odds are infinitesimally small. So astronomically small that in reality they're practically zero. Let's take a look.

Virtually all NCAA tournament brackets disregard the First Four and only pick games starting with the first round. Since there are 64 teams in those brackets, the most basic calculation is the number of possible outcomes for 63 games picked randomly. That would be 2 (the number of potential winners for each game) to the 63rd power (the number of games in the bracket). More simply, that's 2 times 2, 63 times, which is equal to roughly 9.2 quintillion. But that's an oversimplification, only accurate if every game was a coin flip. For a more in-depth explanation, check out this story:

ADDITIONAL READING: The absurd odds of a perfect NCAA tournament bracket put into perspective

So, what is the greatest bracket we know of? 

We looked at millions of brackets from the largest online bracket games to find the longest a verifiable bracket had gone undefeated, and the best we have found went an incredible 39 games before getting one wrong. That’s ridiculous, but it’s still just 61.9 percent of the way to a perfect bracket.

In 2018, the best bracket in our Capital One Bracket Challenge Game — out of millions of entries — picked 51 of 63 games correctly, for a percentage of 80.95.

In the eight years that we’ve run a bracket game, the best we’ve ever seen is 54 picks (85.7 percent accuracy), which happened in both 2015 and 2017.

Here’s the breakdown for the winning brackets every year in our bracket challenge game, with the number of games correctly picked compare to the number of games per round:

Lesson 4: March Madness history

Where did the phrase “March Madness” come from?

March Madness was first used to refer to basketball by an Illinois high school official, Henry V. Porter, in 1939, but the term didn’t find its way to the NCAA tournament until CBS broadcaster Brent Musburger (who used to be a sportswriter in Chicago) used it during coverage of the 1982 tournament. The term has been synonymous with the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament ever since.

ADDITIONAL READING: March Madness history ultimate guide

Who has won every NCAA tournament?

In the 80 years since the tournament’s inception, 35 different teams have won a championship, but no team has won more than UCLA, which has 11, 10 of which came a span of 12 years from 1964 to 1975.

Here is the list of every men’s basketball national championship since the NCAA tournament first started in 1939:

*Louisville’s participation in the 2013 tournament was later vacated by the Committee on Infractions.

Who has the most NCAA tournament championships?

In the 80 years since the tournament’s inception, 35 different teams have won a championship, but no team has won more than UCLA, which has 11, 10 of which came a span of 12 years from 1964 to 1975.

Here are all the teams with three or more titles:

What team has the most NCAA tournament appearances?

There have been 80 NCAA tournaments since 1939, and there are five schools that have been to more than half of them. Kentucky has the most NCAA tournament appearances with 57, followed by North Carolina with 49.

Here is the full list of the top 10 teams:

What team has the most NCAA tournament wins?

Again, it's Kentucky leading the way. The Wildcats have 126 NCAA tournament wins, for an average of 2.2 wins per appearance. The Tar Heels are right behind with 124 wins, or 2.5 per appearance.

Here is the full top 10: