March Madness Party Ideas

Talk the Talk

• The term March Madness is synonymous with the NCAA Basketball Tournament, but the nickname was first used to describe another basketball tournament: the annual Illinois High School Association tournament. Henry V. Porter coined the phrase in his 1939 article for the Illinois Interscholastic magazine.
• A number 16-seed team has never won a tournament game.
• 2008 marked the first time that all number 1 seeds (Kansas, Memphis, North Carolina, and UCLA) advanced to the Final Four.
• The odds of picking a perfect bracket are approximately 9 quintillion to 1. That's 9 billion times 1 billion.
• The last 10 men's tournaments have been won by 9 different schools. The University of Connecticut is the only team to win twice in the last decade.

Originally published on LHJ.com, March 2009.