photo credit: Carter Shilling
It’s March Madness season again, meaning it’s time to pull up those trusty brackets, fill them out, and, if one is feeling lucky, send that bracket off for a chance to win $1 million.
The NCAA tournament, otherwise known as March Madness, and those 68-team brackets seem to be inseparable; the format is even wound into the logo, splayed across every floor tournament games are played on. But it was not always this way: before 1977, there were no NCAA tournament brackets at all.
In that year, Jody and Mary Haggerty started an NCAA tournament pool at their Irish pub, Jody’s Club Forest, in Staten Island, according to NCAA.com. The pot started at $10 each, and began as only an idea to drum up business, according to the couple.
The contest exploded from there, bringing in people from all over the country as word spread.
Pots reached seven digits twice in the contest’s run, according to Spectrum News. By 2006, the pool was $1.6 million for the owner of the most correct bracket.
But this exponential growth turned out to be the Haggertys’ downfall.
According to Spectrum News, when the 2006 winner reported the sum on their taxes, the IRS sought out the pub owners and reviewed the pub’s records, busting the couple not on mismanagement of the betting pool, but rather on underreporting their own income from the bar. After that, Jody’s Club Forest’s NCAA brackets faded into history.
However, there are other claims for the invention of the March Madness bracket.
While the Haggertys were selling brackets and beers, a Kentucky resident was crafting a bracket for the 1978 tournament based upon his recreational softball league bracket, according to PBS News. His bracket, which started out as a game amongst friends and relatives, quickly spread once it was digitized with the launch of Excel in the 1980s.
And yet, the bracket has grown so widespread that it is now impossible to track down where it began at all.
It simply is, with tens of millions of brackets filled each year, according to NCAA.com, and millions of people spending their March rooting for an arbitrary combination of teams they have chosen.
Despite all the mania, there has never been a verified perfect bracket in the 40 years since the 68-team format’s introduction in 1985, according to NCAA.com.
But this doesn’t stop anyone from trying, including students at the school; senior Angel Duarte never misses a year of the tournament.
“I’ll be doing three brackets this year. I’d rate my confidence level [in my bracket] at about a 6/10,” Duarte said.
Freshman Adam Ellison shares this commitment to the contest.
“I’ve been doing a bracket [every year] since sixth grade, and I’ll be doing one again this year,” Ellison said. “I feel pretty confident in my bracket, but it may be a little straightforward to be totally correct.”
But he disagrees with Duarte on the proper way to play the tournament.
“I’m only doing one [bracket] because I feel like if I do two, that’s cheating,” Ellison said. “You should be confident enough in your bracket that you can only choose one winner, and only need one shot.”
But even with their two different schools of thought, the two had some of the picks in the end.
“I’ve got Duke, Houston, Arizona, and Virginia as my Final Four, and Arizona winning,” Ellison said.
Duarte’s was similar in some ways. But while neither chose any “Cinderella” teams, the senior’s lineup was controversial in that he had No. 3 Illinois overtaking No. 2 Houston and claiming the NCAA South.
“I have Duke, Illinois, Arizona, and Iowa State in the semifinals, with Arizona winning,” Duarte said.
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