From its birth in 1939, March Madness has slowly become the holy grail of college basketball. When a team wins this championship, they are crowned the kings of the NCAA until March Madness returns the following year. In fact, some even find college basketball more appealing to watch than professional basketball simply because of this tournament. Sophomore Aidan Howard says he “only watches college basketball for the March Madness, but March Madness is far better than the NBA in his opinion.”

However taking this title back home to one’s college trophy cabinet is notoriously one of the hardest feats in all of sports. The teams in the tournament are ranked by their performances and record in the regular season. Each year, lower-seeded teams will beat top-seeded teams they should never have a chance against on paper. The pressures and hype of this seasonal event often gets to players, making rank merely a number that holds no weight. Games can go either way at any time, meaning the team who simply plays harder on the given day can advance to the next round with a win. When events like this occur, many are left ecstatic or heartbroken for various reasons.

Some people may be showing off their college pride, some may root for the underdogs, and a lot will root for whoever tops their March Madness brackets. Creating brackets has been a huge ordeal ever since upsets became a prevalent theme in the tournament, making picking a perfect bracket a near impossible feat. However, the champion of the whole thing is usually a higher seed. Freshman Keira Slippern chooses her brackets “based on the seed ranking going into the tournament, intuition guiding upset picks and a bit of prior knowledge from watching college basketball in the past.” In The past three years all top seeds have won the tournament, with Villanova winning it twice and University of North Carolina once.

This year the expected winner by a large margin was Duke, led by stars Zion Williamson and R.J. Barrett. Duke games have been some of the most anticipated games thanks to these players as they are both predicted top three picks in the NBA draft. One supporter, junior Cameron Kovats, had Duke going all the way because “Zion is just the best player he has seen in college. He is an unstoppable machine that has an incredible amount of skill in his game as well.” Unfortunately for many, Duke fell to Michigan State in the Elite Eight of the tournament. Currently the teams left standing are Michigan State, Texas Tech, Virginia and Auburn. Virginia was ranked the highest seed coming into the tournament, but any team could come out on top given the talent and pressures involved.

Since nobody has a good idea of who will win the tournament this year, it allows for more interesting games leading up to the big final and plenty of people raging over their flawed brackets. But some people have picked some daunting upsets in their brackets in an attempt to beat of other brackets who simply choose by higher seed. Senior Kunal Bhargava claims “Auburn has a chance to win it all. I chose them as my team in one of my brackets and I feel like nobody else will take that risk.” People become especially invested when they enter their bracket into a sweepstakes or group with their friends. The competition and emotion is what March Madness is all about. Many are simply supporting their favorite school, others just cheer for their bracket pick, and for some of the players, it is their last ever chance to make an impression in basketball history.