March Madness is just around the corner, and students hum with excitement and competition.
March Madness is just around the corner, and students hum with excitement and competition. Running from mid-March to early April, March Madness is another name for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, featuring 68 college teams competing in seven rounds for the designation of national champion. Leading up to the event, people often fill out brackets to predict the winners of every game, a cultural tradition that blends statistics and fan communities.
The term “March Madness” first originated in the 1930s to describe Illinois’ high school tournaments, but grew in popularity with the NCAA Tournament in the 1980s. Predictions, once a fun activity between friends, became a larger phenomenon with the rise of social media and shareable brackets. The beauty of March Madness lies in its unpredictability: an underdog can always upset the top seeds.
(She/her) Ashley Hein is an avid painter, enjoyer of the outdoors, and loving guinea pig mom. In her free time she also loves climbing, and cooking (although she’sTERRIBLE at it).
