One of the most exciting events in all of American sports is steadily approaching. Every year, the NCAA hosts March Madness, an epic tournament that pits the best college basketball teams in the country against one another to determine who will be the National Champion.
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The tournament, which always takes place in the month of March (hence the name), features 68 teams and 67 grueling games. But how exactly are teams selected for the annual extravaganza? Here is everything you need to know about March Madness.
The Format
Kicking off March Madness is Selection Sunday. This is when the Selection Committee, which comprises school and conference administrators, reveals all 68 Division I teams from across the United States that are competing. They also select the seeding and determine the brackets for the tournament.
March Madness consists of seven rounds of single-elimination games. Once a team is defeated they are officially eliminated from the competition. The rounds even consist of fun titles. They are the First Four, First round, Second round, Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four, and the NCAA Finals.
The First Four is when the bottom-tiered teams battle it out to take the field down to 64 teams. Once that happens the remaining 64 teams are given a seed number from 1-16 and placed in one of four regions. The #1 ranked team battles the #16th ranked team and so on.
The Sweet 16 round means there are only 16 teams left. Then down to eight, then four, and finally the championship game when only two teams are left standing.
How teams are selected
There are only two ways for a team to earn a bid to the March Madness tournament. One is automatic qualifiers. These are the 31 champions who won their postseason conference tournament. Regardless of how a team does during the season, if they are eligible for the postseason tournament and emerge victorious, they receive an automatic bid to compete in March Madness.
The second way is via an at-large bid. This is when the Selection Committee looks at 37 teams that did not win conference tournaments and determines which has enough pedigree to compete. To determine this, the committee leverages several statistics and rankings from each team, but no official formula has ever determined what schools get selected.
After the teams are chosen they are given their seeding and the region brackets are formed.
When does March Madness start
The 2025 March Madness tournament begins on March 16th with Selection Sunday. The First Four games begin on March 18th, and the First Round will be officially underway on March 20th. The championship game takes place on April 7th at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
