When Does March Madness 2023 Start?

If you’re a basketball fan, March is a time of year that’s extra special. You’ll probably be hearing a lot about brackets, buzzer beaters and bubble teams soon, as the 2023 March Madness is right around the corner. 

All this next month’s insanity refers to the time of year, usually around the last half of March, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournaments occurs for both men and women’s college basketball.

This year, the men’s NCAA championship for March Madness starts with First Four games in Dayton, Ohio and will continue through to the Final Four stage in Houston, Texas.

Starting on Sunday, March 12th, take a look at this year’s schedule in the following tweet:

March Madness 2023

•Selection Sunday: Sunday, March 12
•First Four: March 14-15
•First round: March 16-17
•Second round: March 18-19
•Sweet 16: March 23-24
•Elite Eight: March 25-26
•Final Four: April 1
•NCAA championship game: April 3

— Deborah Austin (@DebsSweet) February 15, 2023

The NCAA college basketball championship is a single-elimination contest featuring 68 teams fighting to pull through three weekends of matches until one will finally conquer the national title. The NCAA recently added four more squads to participate in the “play in” qualifying games to win a place in the final pool of 64.

After the first weekend, only 16 teams will survive, a stage popularly known as the “Sweet Sixteen”. Afterwards, the second weekend filters the field to the “Elite Eight” and days later, the “Final Four”.

Finally, the final weekend concentrates only the four candidates, who in knock-out semifinals decide the last two teams who’ll compete for the championship title.

32 out of the original 68 college squads in the tournament, receive automatic bids for winning their respective conferences. The rest, based upon their performance during the current season, are given bids by the NCAA selection committee.

Once the complete field is set, each squad is seeded within its region. The teams will be divided into four geographical divisions, traditionally divided into eastern, western, midwestern, and southern brackets.

Time to start eyeing your predictions for this year’s Madness!

As this year’s Selection Sunday is already less than three weeks away, it’s right about time to make your predictions over who will win all 32 men’s basketball conference tournaments and secure automatic bids to the NCAA tournament.

Check out college basketball analyst Andy Katz choose his picks for the selection at inauguration:

Part of the fun from all this basketball hysteria, is the fact that millions of people fill out their own brackets, attempting to predict the winners of all the games. As it is almost impossible to predict a perfect bracket, there normally are lots of failures in the process. To be exact, the possibility of guessing every matches’ victor are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. How about it?

Why is it called Madness? Millions of sports fans follow the games on television over the course of the three-week tournament, as multiple contests are played simultaneously all over the United States.

Up to now, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) are the historic winners of March Madness, as they hold the record for the most national titles with 11.