NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament
Current season, competition or edition: 2017 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament
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| Sport | College basketball |
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| Founded | 1939 |
| No. of teams | 68 (since 2011) |
| Most recent champion(s) |
Villanova (2) |
| Most titles | UCLA (11) |
| TV partner(s) | CBS/TBS/TNT/TruTV |
| Official website | NCAA.com |
The NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament is a single-elimination tournament played each spring in the United States, currently featuring 68 college basketball teams from the Division I level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), to determine the national championship. The tournament was created in 1939 by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, and was the idea of Ohio State University coach Harold Olsen. Played mostly during March, it is known informally as March Madness or the Big Dance, and has become one of the most famous annual sporting events in the United States.
The tournament teams include champions from 32 Division I conferences (which receive automatic bids), and 36 teams which are awarded at-large berths. These "at-large" teams are chosen by an NCAA selection committee, then announced in a nationally televised event on the Sunday preceding the First Four play-in games, currently held in Dayton, Ohio, and dubbed Selection Sunday. The 68 teams are divided into four regions and organized into a single elimination "bracket", which pre-determines, when a team wins a game, which team it will face next. Each team is "seeded", or ranked, within its region from 1 to 16. After an initial four games between eight lower-ranked teams, the tournament occurs during the course of three weekends, at pre-selected neutral sites across the United States. Teams, seeded by rank, proceed through a single game elimination bracket beginning with a first round consisting of 64 teams, to a "Sweet Sixteen", and for the last weekend of the tournament, a Final Four. The Final Four is usually played during the first weekend of April. These four teams, one from each region (East, South, Midwest, and West), compete in one location for the national championship.
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