By: JJ G

March Madness is a Division I competitive NCAA basketball tournament. Both men and women can play. 64 American teams are organized into 4 brackets. The winner of each bracket will get to the Final Four to fight for the championship. The women’s basketball championship is at the same time as the men’s championship, in March. But they are in different brackets.

Henry V. Porter, an American educator, coach, and athletic administrator from Illinois, started March Madness in 1939. The first March Madness winner was Oregon who faced Ohio State. The final was a low-scoring game of 46-33.

The youngest-ever coach to win a title at March Madness took part in the second-ever NCAA tournament. Emmett “Branch” McCracken won the 1940 tournament with Indiana’s team at 31 years of age and still holds the record of the youngest coach to win the tournament to this very day.

People enjoy predicting brackets during March Madness, making guesses about who will win each game. But there are 67 games played in March Madness, so it is hard to correctly guess all the games and the score for the championship. In fact, there is a 1-in-9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to correctly pick every game. It is a smaller chance that you will guess a bracket right than get struck by lightning.

This March Madness, records are being broken in both women’s and men’s games. In fact, women are breaking women’s and men’s records.