By Cory Tell, Staff Writer, ’14

While college football may present the most pressurized and condensed regular season in all of sports, college basketball gives fans a full month of elimination games, where excitement and thrill are met with trepidation and anxiety. The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament, commonly known as March Madness, is know for its high volume of intense, unpredictable games. Shocking upsets and overtime thrillers can happen simultaneously in the early rounds, and “The Big Dance” provides moments that are etched in history forever, such as Christian Laettner’s famous game winning shot for Duke to beat Kentucky in the 1992 Elite Eight, or Bill Walton’s near perfect game for UCLA in the 1973 Championship Game versus Memphis State. March Madness is no misnomer: it’s truly crazy.

One of the reasons why the college basketball postseason is followed so closely is that fans fill out millions of brackets across the country, attempting to accurately predict the results of every game. The bracket, split up into four different regions of 16 teams, is eventually whittled down to a Final Four and Championship Game. Predicting the final is exceptionally difficult. Two years ago, when the Final Four didn’t feature a number one seed for just the third time since 1980, and Virginia Commonwealth became just the third number 11 seed to reach the Final Four, only two of the nearly 6 million brackets submitted to ESPN had all four of the Final Four teams. “Bracketology”, which has become the term associated with predicating the winner of every game of the tourney before it actually begins, has undoubtedly added to the contagiousness of March Madness.

Selection Sunday, the Sunday before the tournament, is when a selection committee made up of Division 1 men’s and women’s athletic directors and conference commissioners decides who gets into the 68-team tournament and who doesn’t. Bubble teams, those that are considered to be on the borderline between selection and rejection, feel a tremendous amount of stress in the days and weeks leading up the selection. A principal reason why the bubble teams are so difficult to predict is because their tournament resumes have many incongruities associated with them. For example, Villanova, which beat top ten Big East opponents Louisville and Syracuse in consecutive games, lost earlier in the season by 18 points to Columbia, which is second-to-last in the weak Ivy League. There exists no simple formula for a tournament berth.

There is also inconsistency about which are the nation’s top teams. This season has been marked by its unusually large amount of parity, with over a dozen teams considered to have a legitimate shot at winning the championship. There was even a point where the number one ranked team in the polls switched hands five straight weeks.

Many attribute college basketball’s lack of consistently dominant teams to the “one and done” philosophy, where top athletes leave college for the NBA after just the required one year of college. This means that top programs are often in a state of perpetual rebuilding. Oftentimes, teams in smaller conferences, like Colorado St. and Saint Louis, retain their players for four years, which allows their team to make up for the deficit they face in recruiting by having a team full of experienced players and savvy veterans. The implications of this dynamic are clear as upsets become more and more common. College sports fanatic Zach Persing ’15 sees “one-and-done” as a positive, saying, “having fewer dominant teams, due to the fact more players than ever are ‘one and done’, may provide for more excitement come tournament time.”

There is a significant following of March Madness in the Newark Academy community, especially because the early rounds of the tournament are played during Spring Break. Students can savor the thrilling games during their time off, as they are not engrossed in homework or studying for tests. Harrison Glatt ’14 is so fond of the tournament that he even said, “If we were in school and there was homework during March Madness, I would not do it because I love (the tournament) so much.”

Additionally, there are a multitude of March Madness pools amongst the Newark Academy students, and typically, there is a heavy incentive for the winner of the bracket, which creates even more interest in the tournament. Lauren Catena ’14 said, “I like being in a bracket because it is fun to compete with my friends, and I like trying to get more picks right than them.”

Matt Ratner ’14 summed up March Madness well when he said, “I love the unpredictability of it all. Any team can win. And trying to pick which teams will win is exciting. Anything can happen in March, it’s madness!”