How Are Teams Selected For March Madness

College basketball’s March Madness is probably the biggest sporting event of the year. The 2020 season begins on March 17 and concludes on April 6.

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Looking for a blank March Madness 2020 bracket to print? Use our free, printable PDF and join in on the NCAA March Madness tournament fun! Want to watch March Madness online without cable in 2020? Learn about the best streaming options so you don't miss a game.

Every March something absolutely amazing happens in the sports world. Fans all around the country pull on their college basketball jerseys, park themselves in front of the television, and stay there for days on end.

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It’s called March Madness and it’s the NCAA college basketball tournament. Nothing else in sports compares to it.

March Madness actually begins the first weekend in March when almost every conference in Division I basketball has their conference tournaments. And then at the end of that weekend, on Sunday evening, the brackets are released showing which teams will play where for the NCAA tourney, and then the real madness begins.

Fans all over the country study the brackets and try to pick which teams will win in each of the 6 rounds. Most of this studying is done at work along with a lot of discussion between employees.

One estimate in 2006 stated that companies all across America lose a whopping 3.8 billion dollars in productivity because of the NCAA tournament. But it can’t be helped. No one and nothing can stop March Madness. It’s just that popular.

In fact, even people who never watch sports will go out and buy a jersey of a team that is doing surprisingly well in the tournament. And there are always surprise teams that come out of no where and win a few games in the tournament.

How are the 64 teams picked for march madness

It’s part of the magic of March Madness.

65 teams are selected to play in the tournament. The bottom 2 teams have to play each other in order to make it into the field of 64 teams.

The 64 teams are divided into 4 regions and seeded in each region from 1 to 16. Then the teams play each other with the highest seeds playing the lowest seeds in the first round.

But seeding rarely means anything. In fact, the only seed that’s never lost a first round game is the #1 seed, but it seems more and more likely that a #1 seed will fall in the first round sometime very soon.

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You would think teams with a heavy basketball tradition, teams with names on their jerseys like North Carolina, Duke, UCLA, or Indiana would be spared embarrassing defeats at the hands of smaller, much-less known schools, but they aren’t.

Even the defending champion Florida Gators have to watch out. When the ball is thrown up for the opening tip, the team that is against them will be ready to shock the world and pull a huge upset.

March Madness is always full of upsets and buzzer beaters. So many games come right down to the wire that fans have a hard time catching their breath sometimes.

This year promises to be no different. It seems that the Florida Gators, the Ohio State Buckeyes, or possibly the UCLA Bruins have the inside track to win the National Championship, but who really knows? When March Madness begins, any one of 65 teams can win the title, and nobody knows which team it will be until the nets are cut down in early April.


Only You Care How It’s Built

Remember the last time you were really frustrated when using something? It didn’t work as you expected or you couldn’t find what you were looking for. As your attention focused on the people who built the tortuous tool, do you remember thinking to yourself, “That’s OK. I hear they have a great process.” No? The unfortunate truth is that the people you are building for will not care how you got there, only whether you solved one of their problems in a positive way.

How Are Teams Selected For March Madness

I think this is one of the reasons behind the first agile value, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. It is tempting, when integrating new practices, such as with scrum, to get caught up in the mechanics of a new process. There are new ways of working and new tools to learn, and these can take a lot of time, energy, and focus. It can be tempting to do things ‘by the book’ when first starting out, but that puts our focus on the wrong goal. The team is not there to perfect a process, but to deliver value to real people.

How Are The Teams Selected For March Madness

So why “Individuals and interactions,” and not “results”? Results don’t make a product, people do. The people are the invisible force that create the product. As one of the agile principles states, “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

Pixar’s Randy Nelson has a fantastic definition of collaboration not as cooperation, but amplification. A good team that works well together will amplify each others’ skills and abilities to create better results than they would as individuals. This definitely resonates with my personal experience. My best ideas usually come when I’m engaged with others, not when I’m by myself. Sure, I have a few Eureka! moments wearing headphones, pushing pixels, but the bulk of them come from the interaction with other minds approaching the problem from different directions, each with their unique personal history.

How Are Teams Chosen For March Madness

There are many elements that create an environment that a allows a team to succeed. As implied above, clear goals and measurable results is one. I’ll go into that and a few more in a future post. In the meantime, what is it about your environment that supports or hinders your team? Do you have motivated people? Do your stakeholders trust you to make decisions on their behalf? Are you focused on value? What have you changed about your environment that has had a positive impact?

How Are The 64 Teams Picked For March Madness

As always, I look forward to your comments. Also, please take a moment to rate this post by clicking the stars below the title. It helps me know if I’m on the right track and I really appreciate the feedback. If there is a specific topic you’d like me to address, add it to the Suggest a Topic page.

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