BY ASHLY SCHMITT
Staff Writer
No wonder why the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s and Women’s basketball tournament is named, “March Madness”. Its been going on since 1908 causing basketball fans all over the world literally go mad and cause chaos over the brackets. This month marks the sit on the edge of your seat throughout all of the games mentality.
There are 68 of the teams playing throughout this time with the weight of single elimination hanging over their shoulders. The brackets are set up by rankings, but we all know these rankings lead to upsets. Threes always those people who want to root for the underdog! The playing and hype goes on for three weeks. The heavily weighted games comes the next two weeks, when it is down to the Sweet Sixteen. Then the teams get trimmed down until there are the Final Four. The Final Four won’t play until April, so it’s quite a long ongoing madness.
Fans go crazy for the semifinal and final championships packing the gym decked out in their team’s colors. Rivalries get extra heated, so it gets ugly whenever Duke plays North Carolina or Kentucky plays Louisville and so on. There is over a 20 picture photo stream titled, “Wacky fans of March Madness” dedicated just for those fans going over the top packing the gyms for these games.
This year we had Kentucky and Wisconsin to play off in the Final Four. They were both the number 1 ranked teams in their separate brackets. Needless to mention that Kentucky was on a 38 game winning streak and was games away from a perfect, legendary season. On the other side, we had Duke and Gonzaga, the first and second seed of their brackets along with Michigan State, which was seated 7th. The Final Four was on April 4th followed by the championship April 6th.
