CYHSB WEEKLY

Cooper Yeshiva High School for Boys

Volume 18, Issue 13

Parshas Vayikra: Stronger Together

Page 3

March Madness: What You Need to Know

Raanan Vanderwalde (’25) March is here and that means it is time for the NCAA National Basketball Tournaments. With the men’s tournament kicking off just last week and more games being played this weekend, now is the time when all bracket makers are on the edge of their seats hoping their selected teams win.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the organization that runs all college level sports. In 1939 they first introduced and created the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, which started out with only eight teams. By 1985, the tournament field reached a total of 64 teams, the number that still stands today. The tournament is now well known as “March Madness,” a term first popularized during a live tournament broadcast. Today, almost everyone in America has heard of this iconic sports event, and making March Madness brackets has become a common tradition.

In the tournament, 64 teams are each given a seed of 1-16. There are 4 sections of the bracket each with a set of 16 teams. In the first round, each team competes against their opposite seed in their quadrant (1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, etc). The winner of each of the four quadrants moves on to the final four, and then to the final game where they compete for the NCAA men’s basketball National Championship. Teams are chosen based on a set of requirements and assessments by the NCAA Basketball Committee. 32 teams have automatic spots in the tournament because they won their division. The other teams are chosen by the committee using a system called NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) points, based on judgements of their regular season games.

On average, over 70 million brackets are filled out by Americans every year. A bracket is a list of predictions as to which teams are going to win, all the way to the final game. Many brackets are wagered upon as a fun activity or, if you think you are familiar with the teams, a way to win money. One of the biggest appeals of making a March Madness bracket is the idea that it might be perfect. As a bracket maker myself, I know that there is always the thought in your mind that maybe you will have a perfect bracket. However, the odds of making a perfect bracket are infinitesimally small. If we were to estimate the odds of guessing the correct outcome of a game to be 50%, after calculating the odds for 63 games, your odds of making a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. To put that number into perspective: The estimated amount of trees in the world is three trillion. Imagine that there was one acorn hidden in one of those three trillion trees, and you were asked which tree has the acorn. Your odds of guessing the correct tree are approximately three million times greater than the odds of picking a perfect bracket. More hopeful bracket makers who believe they have great knowledge of college basketball want to make the chance of correctly picking the outcome of a game 2 in 3 (66.7%). But even in this scenario, the odds of creating a perfect bracket are 1 in 120 billion.

Due to the odds being incredibly low, no perfect bracket has ever been recorded in the history of the 64 team tournament. The longest streak of a perfect bracket ever recorded happened in 2019 when a man correctly guessed the outcome of the first 49 games. This year, no brackets stayed perfect past two days of the tournament (the first round). The reason for this was the surprising nature of this year’s March Madness.

Three surprising wins came in the first round: Furham (13) beat Virginia (4), Princeton (15) beat Arizona (2), and FDU (16) beat Purdue (1). Princeton’s win over Arizona was remarkable, taking down one of the favorites to win in the whole tournament by a score of 59-55. However, even more remarkable was how 16th seeded FDU defeated Purdue, making it only the second time in history that a 16 seed unseated a 1 seed. Three times more people put Purdue winning the National Championship than put them to lose the first round to FDU. Some surprising outcomes came in the second round as well, when Princeton won their second game against Missouri (7), making this the third year in a row that a 15th seeded team has advanced to the Sweet 16 (3rd round). Some more fan favorite teams got wiped out in the second round including Kansas (1) and Marquette (2). Only two 1st seeded teams still remain going into the third round: Houston and Alabama.

This year our high school has a March Madness bracket competition where many students have submitted their picks for the winner of the tournament. While it may be very frustrating to see your teams lose, making a bracket is a very exciting activity. While it might be too late to enter your own March Madness bracket if you haven’t already done so, it is not too late to tune in to watch the remaining games and enjoy the fun.