March Madness has begun

65 Teams. 64 games. 21 days. 13 locations.

1 champion.

• Aaron Benson / Sports Editor
• scrollsports@byui.edu

Three weeks of madness will begin today, March 13, in Dayton, Ohio, as Florida A&M and Niagara kick off action at the NCAA men’s basketball championship.

The two teams are competing in the tournament’s play-in game. The winner will play top-seeded Kansas on March 15.

Every year, 65 teams get to play in the tournament, while 32 are relegated to the lesser National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and 239 stay home.

The NCAA tournament takes the 34 Division I conference champions, and a selection committee chooses 31 more teams to fill out the tournament bracket.

The committee places the 65 teams into four regional brackets of 16 teams each, with one 17-team bracket that includes the play-in teams.

Each team is ranked from one to 16 in its region. The team that wins each region advances to the Final Four in Atlanta to compete for the championship.

The tournament’s unpredictability and excitement have garnered it nicknames such as The Big Dance and March Madness. Part of its charm comes from frequent first- and second-round upsets.

Last year, 14-seed Northwestern State (La.) beat 3-seed Iowa on a last-second three-point shot. Thirteen-seed Bradley beat perennial power and 4-seed Kansas. Eleven-seed George Mason beat 6-seed Michigan State and 3-seed North Carolina in the first two rounds.

Upsets like these get casual fans rooting for the underdogs and help smaller schools make a name for themselves on a national stage; the upsets also bust a lot of brackets as fans try to predict who will win each game.

This year’s number-one seeds are North Carolina, Florida, Kansas and Ohio State.

Smaller schools, coming from mid-major conferences have again made a statement, with Southern Illinois from the Missouri Valley Conference getting a 4-seed and Butler from the Horizon League getting a 5-seed.

Last year, eight of the 31 at-large bids went to mid-major conferences, and one mid-major, George Mason of the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA), made it all the way to the final four, beating major-conference teams like Michigan State, North Carolina and Connecticut to get there.

This year, however, only six at-large bids went to mid-major conferences.

The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) has the most teams in the tournament with seven, including 1-seed North Carolina and 4-seeds Virginia and Maryland. The Big East, Pac-10 and Big Ten conferences each have 6 teams in the tournament.

First-round play begins on Thursday with 4-seed Maryland against 13-seed Davidson in Buffalo, N.Y. All tournament games, except for the play-in game, will be televised on CBS.