It's Truly Madness

It’s the time of year where people learn more about the Division 1 colleges and universities than they ever thought existed. It is the time where small colleges from small conferences take on the power teams from power conferences. The term David and Goliath will be grossly overused, at least one Top 25 team will get stunned in the first round, and every Average Joe will have the “perfect bracket”. These things add up to one thing March Madness, where college basketball comes to a close and a new champion is crowned.

The 68 teams in the field are split into 4 regions and raked 1 to 16. Two 16 ranked teams will have to play an extra game to get a shot at playing the top two ranked teams in the whole tournament. From there, the tournament continues as a normal single elimination format until one team from each region meet in the Final Four held at a different location from year to year. This year the Final Four is being playing in the Alamodome in San Antonio, with the eventual NCAA Champion being crowned on April 2nd. The bids for the tournament are given to all the conference champions sometimes a conference will have two auto bids for their regular season champion and their tournament champion. The rest of the field is given by at-large bids, this process is done by a group of people who watch each team and evaluate if they deserves to be in the tournament and their rank. Mostly, the Power 5 conferences grab more of the at-large bids because of the competition they play regularly throughout the regular season.

This year’s tourney field at the time of publication been released yet but there are some early favorites to win it all. The largest favorite is the Virginia Cavilers the ACC champions and the number one ranked team in the country. They were once a perennial power house but really faded out of view as Duke and North Carolina improved and sort of left Virginia behind. But in the last five years under Tony Bennett, Virginia has returned to the top of one of the best conferences in America. They have relied on a very intricate defenses that has held their last 34 opponents under 70 points and has helped them to a high national rank the past three years. The problem that Virginia has ran into their past attempts in the NCAA Tournament is they have had a hard time scoring the basketball which becomes a problem due to the amount of games played within the short time frame in which the tourney is held. As you play your legs become tired, preventing the rotations you make from being as sharp allowing more points. However, this year with the offensive emergence of Kyle Guy that problem seems to become resolved and they are one of my favorites to win the tournament.