pimblr.com

Sports fans young and old enjoy betting on college basketball during March Madness. Everyone has a bracket and their predictions for each of the 63 games. March Madness got as huge as it is because of sports wagering. The NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship owes its popularity to the basketball pool. Every sports news publication and website is flooded with NCAA information and a copy of the 65 team bracket. In the month of March, millions of sports fans will talk about who to put in the Sweet 16 and what the outcomes will be. Employees across the country will be gathering around the watering hole, talking about their picks and brackets.
However, the tournament hasn’t always been this intense. In fact, March Madness did not originate around the press or the publicity of the multimillion dollar sports industry. In 1939, the NCAA started a postseason tournament for teams with conference affiliation. Schools such as Notre Dame, Marquette and Temple were unable to secure bids into the NCAA because of their independent status. Instead, these schools played in the National Invitational Tournament which was the NCAA’s postseason rival that started the year before.
The NIT was created by New York City’s five colleges to showcase East Coast basketball. It was played at Madison Square Gardens. The NCAA changed its rules in the ’50s and allowing more conferences to participate in the tournament, creating at large bids for schools not affiliated with a conference. The bracket grew from 8 teams to 16 teams in 1951 and eventually 24 teams by the following year. In the ’70s, forty teams were invited each March, and in the ’80s the NCAA had 64 teams, a full 4 region bracket with sixteen teams each.
More popularity came with the increase in teams. UCLA was in the spotlight under the tutelage of John Wooden when the Final Four began to be played in larger stadiums. The games got even more coverage when NBC broadcasted the Final Four to a national television audience in the ’60s. Larry Bird, faced off against Magic Johnson in the national championship game in 1979. Magic Johnson’s team, Michigan State Spartans, won the title that year in a game that ended up being the most viewed college basketball game in television history. This game brought millions of new college basketball fans to the sport.

bignews.biz

Now that the NCAA Tournament brackets are set, the time has come to figure out who will get to the ultimate stage. For all of the NCAA Tournament’s early upsets, the Final Four is usually made up of the usual favorites and slightly lower seeded teams from power conferences. George Mason was the exception two years ago, but last year’s Final Four had a more stable offering of two number 1 and two number 2 seeds. This year, it would appear that the NCAA Tournament favorites have a clear path to the Final Four. But who will come out of each bracket for real?
East Regional Bracket- North Carolina Tar Heels
The Tar Heels are the overall number 1 NCAA seed, with only two losses at home this season. With the likely Player of the Year in Tyler Hansbrough, the Tar Heels have a clear mission to overcome their come from ahead loss in last year’s Elite 8. In addition, all of the Tar Heels potential games in the East Regional would be in the state of North Carolina.
Behind them, Tennessee has been on top of the SEC most of the year, having only slipped down to a number 2 seed in the final weekend. However, the Volunteers will always be suspect since they don’t have a big men’s basketball tradition. In addition, they could get tripped up in the second round by mid-major powers Butler or South Alabama.

read_more

“There’s something to this that defies rational explanation,” says Lunardi, who this weekend will appear wall to wall on various ESPN channels. “People say I must have had a grand plan, but I’m not that smart.”
No one is. Lunardi — a.k.a. “Joey Brackets” — is the father of bracketology, the term for the incessant musing about NCAA tournament teams and seedings which will be feverish until CBS’ NCAA Selection Show Sunday ends the suspense and starts the second-guessing.
Lunardi didn’t think about brackets until he was a student in 1982 at St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia — where he’s now an assistant marketing vice president for non-athletic areas — and hoped its team would get a certain seed and play a No. 1 seed in the second round on TV: “Getting even one national TV game in a decade was huge!”
By 1996, he began offering “bracket guesses” on ESPN.com. One day in 2002, he got his own page, linked to ESPN.com’s home page, and in under two hours got more than 250,000 hits. He says ESPN took notice: “At some point, somebody said, ‘Can this guy speak, too?’ “
He became an on-air fixture, missing only 10 NCAA team predictions in eight years: “Half those misses was my faulty analysis, the others the committee got wrong. They’re human, too.”

read_more