March Madness is the name for the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. Every year the 32 champions of each D1 conference and 36 other (at-large) teams compete in a single elimination tournament to decide the Champion. In One Shining Moment, it's all on the line.
After the First Four play in games, there are 64 teams remaining in the hunt for the title. There are four regions (East, South, Midwest, and West) each with 16 teams seeded 1-16. Each round of the tournament has a different name, and two rounds are played each weekend. The first weekend has the Round of 64 and the Round of 32, the second weekend has the Sweet Sixteen and the Elite Eight, and the final weekend has the Final Four and the Championship game.
It's a tradition for individuals to complete a bracket making their picks for who will win each game. We're adding to this by rewarding the person in our pool whose bracket is most correct with prize money.
Click here for a printable version of this year's bracket.
Sports are more enjoyable to watch when you have a rooting interest in the teams. Filling out a bracket can make you invested in games you wouldn't otherwise care about. Also, this tournament, being single elimination, is famous for upsets (lower seeded team beating a higher seeded one) and Cinderellas (low seeded teams making it much further in the tournament than expected).
Those of us who get worked up about filling out a bracket like to pretend there's a lot of skill involved, but the number of times I've been beaten by people picking teams based on the mascot would say otherwise. They don't call it madness for nothing.
One unsolicited piece of advice I will give is to pick in the reverse direction (Champion -> Semis -> Final Four -> Elite Eight -> etc). This allows you to have fun picking some upsets without wasting a lot of potential points.