Amaze your friends with these March Madness facts and figures
Spring is in the air and the sports season is hotting up. Before the dust gets a chance to settle at State Farm Stadium after Super Bowl LVII, attention will shift to basketball and March Madness.
It’s arguably the highlight of the college sports year, as for a few weeks, everyone is suddenly a basketball expert. At least, that’s what they like to think. The truth is, it is such an open field that trying to call a favorite for the championship is a topic on which even the pundits are circumspect. But Gamble Online has assembled the March Madness favorites 2023 to provide a valuable sports book’s eye perspective of this year’s combatants.
Casually mentioning which teams the bookies fancy will help establish you as an authority on March Madness. But if you want to put the question of your expertise beyond all doubt, there’s nothing like mentally storing up some fun trivia. Here are some facts and figures that will amuse and entertain.
What’s in a name?
In 1939, an Illinois High School Association (IHSA) Official by the name of H.V. Porter penned an article for IHSA Magazine. He entitled the article March Madness and wrote: “A little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel.”Plenty has changed over the past 84 years, but that is a sentiment that we can all get behind in 2023!
Porter used the phrase again in a poem entitled Basketball Ideas of March, which opened with the line “The madness of March is running.” A year later, the name was informally adopted for the March tournament and in 1977, IHSA officially licensed the name.
Equal opportunities
In 1982, women’s basketball joined the madness. Louisiana Tech won the inaugural championship, and won it again in 1988. They have also been runners up four times, but were last finalists in 1998.
UConn are the most successful women’s team
UConn have been crowned women’s champions 11 times, including a streak of four straight titles between 2013 and 2016. Even more interesting, though, is that their success seemed to rub off on the guys. In 2004 and 2014, UConn won both the men’s and women’s championships. No other school has ever won both titles in the same year.
Don’t bet on a perfect bracket
Everyone loves to make their March Madness predictions, and filling out the bracket is all part of the fun. The odds of filling out a perfect bracket are one in 9.25 quintillion if you fill it out at random or the flip of a coin. That’s 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
But what if you study the fixtures and use your in-depth knowledge? Then the odds of getting it right are slashed to one in 120.2 billion, or 1 in 120,200,000,000. In other words, you still have a much better chance of winning the Powerball. If you like playing with numbers, the NCAA website will run you through the calculations.
