MARCH MADNESS

By: Joshua Golden Staff Writer

Another March has passed, another March Madness to look back on. March Madness is the exciting time of year when college basketball is at its peak and everyone is submitting their personal brackets. It seems like every year there is a mind-boggling upset and a different underdog team who upsets a top ranking team. This often results in the utter destruction of everyone’s brackets.

For those who don’t know, the term “brackets” refers to the style in which the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament is presented. These brackets are broken into four separate tournaments based on the region of the top-seeded team. The regions are the East, West, South and Midwest. The tournament consists of 68 teams with 15 teams and a play in game in each regional tournament. The teams who had the most success during their season will rank higher in the tournament and the teams who were not as good will be ranked lower. The matchups between teams take place in bracketed rounds where the winner advances and plays the winner of another round. Once a regional champion is crowned, the top four teams will play in what is named the Final Four. The winners of these two games will compete for the NCAA National Championship.

This style of tournament has been turned into a fun betting/ challenge experience where fans will customize their bracket based on their predictions of the tournament and submit them to the NCAA. The obvious goal is to predict the tournament completely and have a perfect bracket. Too bad there has never been a perfect bracket, meaning nobody has ever won this challenge according to the NCAA.

Despite there being a lack of March Madness winners on the fan side, there have been some incredible winners on the side of the actual players. From the Cinderella stories to the dominant run of champions, here are some of the tournaments most maddening and iconic moments throughout history.

To start, we all know that Michael Jordan is a pro basketball legend, but some fans may not know his championship legacy has been fruitful long before the prime of his professional career. As a freshman for the University of North Carolina (UNC), Jordan hit the game-winning jump shot to secure his team the title in 1982.

Or how about when Steph Curry lit up the Wisconsin Badgers with 33 points in their Elite Eight matchup. He shot the lights out throughout that entire tournament while playing for a small Division 1 school, Davidson College.

In 2003, Carmelo Anthony led Syracuse to a championship win during his freshman year. In a neck-and-neck game against Kansas, Syracuse player Hakim Warrick blocked a three-point shot that secured them their win. This was Melo’s one-and-done college season that got him selected third overall in the first Round of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Draft.

We can’t forget about the 2016 Villanova and UNC championship game in which Villanova forward Kris Jenkins hit a buzzer-beating, game-winning three-point shot after UNC guard Marcus Paige hit a circus three with less than 5 seconds remaining in the game. They won 77-74 in a tightly contested game. There are so many more iconic moments from March Madness than just these and so many more to come. Maybe someone will finally submit a perfect bracket and find a method to the madness.