Let the madness begin: Who will come out of the madness unscathed?
There is one week left until the madness of basketball is going to unfold. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament will be commencing in Dayton, Ohio. The First Four will be playing in the UD Arena.
As a result of it being March Madness, the annual challenge put on by billionaire Warren Buffett, the bracket prediction, will take place. The person to accurately guess the bracket of the tournament will win $100,000. If you would like to participate in this challenge, you need to enter your bracket before Sunday, March 13, 2022, at 6:00 p.m. EST.
The event that is tied to the locked bracket at 6:00 p.m. on March 13th is called the Selection Sunday. This is when all the teams are ranked by a selection committee based on how well they played during the regular season. Then the First Four is when the four teams that are the worst at-large compete against the four teams that are the four worst automatic bids. Once the first five days of madness are over, then the fun starts. The official bracket is made with the official 64 teams.
Last year, the men’s Baylor Bears, Gonzaga Bulldogs, Illinois Fighting Illini and the Michigan Wolverines received the number one seeds for the bracket. For the ladies, it was the Louisville Cardinals, NC State Wolfpack, South Carolina Gamecocks and the Stanford Cardinal.
This year, the Gonzaga Bulldogs are as strong as ever, even without Jalen Suggs. On the other hand, while the Illinois Fighting Illini only lost one person, it was one person they couldn’t replace: Ayo Dosunmu. The Wolverines thought they were going to lose DeVante Jones, but he decided at the last minute to withdraw from the NBA draft to do one more year at Michigan for the 2021-2022 season. The most significant of them all would be the Baylor Bears; they are suffering from the loss of both Davion Mitchell and Jared Butler.
Which team is your ride or die for this year’s bracket and March Madness? Will you stick with something that you did last year or base it off this year’s scores and records? It could be the year you get that $100,000.
By Gabriel Sanders