Ultimate Guide to the NCAA Basketball Tournament: Schedule and Bracket Templates

Your Complete Guide to the NCAA Basketball Championship: Dates and Printable Brackets

The NCAA Basketball Championship, popularly called March Madness, is undoubtedly one of the biggest sporting events of the year. Fans can anticipate three exciting weekends filled with high-stakes games this season. Attendance is expected to be immense, drawing large crowds nationwide. Here’s everything you need to know about the event, including how to access printable brackets for tournament predictions.

Event Overview
Approximately 136 colleges and universities from across the country participate in this knockout tournament. Over 134 games are played on neutral courts, culminating in crowning the national champion at the end.

Matches continue until April 8th, with extensive media coverage across news outlets and social platforms, ensuring fans stay updated. Many fans also fill out their brackets during this period. Here’s what you need to know about bracket predictions:

How to Fill Out a March Madness Bracket
For newcomers, understanding bracket filling is essential. Statistically, the odds of correctly predicting the outcome of every game in the men's tournament are approximately 1 in 9.2 quintillion. While achieving a perfect bracket is extremely unlikely, the potential rewards make it worth trying.

Typically, all participating teams are arranged in a bracket and face off in single-elimination games. Success means advancing to the next round, while a loss means elimination. The NCAA provides downloadable brackets for both men's and women's tournaments. Fans can choose to fill out brackets online via the NCAA website or print them to fill manually. Viewers can then watch live games to see how their predictions unfold.

Upsets — unexpected wins by lower-seeded teams — often occur and can impact bracket outcomes. The NCAA’s historical data helps enthusiasts make more informed predictions about potential upsets.

Understanding Seeds
Teams are assigned seeds based on their performance. Out of these, 32 teams earn automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments, chosen by the NCAA committee. Seeds are numbered from 1 to 16, with 1 being the strongest. Higher seeds generally indicate weaker teams, while lower seeds show stronger competitors. Matchups feature the top seeds facing each other in regional brackets. During Selection Sunday, four regional brackets are structured based on seedings.

This year, the top four seeds for the men’s tournament are UConn, Houston, Purdue, and North Carolina. For the women’s tournament, the leading seeds include South Carolina, Iowa, USC, and Texas.

Brackets and Viewing Trends
According to Forbes, last year, an estimated $15.5 billion was bet on NCAA games through legal and illegal channels, including office pools and personal wagers. Additionally, 63% of office workers plan to fill out brackets with colleagues, despite the astronomical odds of a perfect prediction.

Viewing habits reveal that over half of workers (51%) watch the tournament at work, with 74% of hybrid workers and 61% of remote employees tuning in from their devices. Nearly 19% have admitted to calling in sick to watch the games. Fans watch via computers (44%), smartphones (23%), and office TVs (10%).

Key Dates and Venues
The tournament begins with Selection Sunday, when brackets are revealed. The competition includes the First Four, first and second rounds, Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four, and culminates in the Championship game. The men’s final four and title match are held at State Farm Stadium near Phoenix, while the women’s Final Four and final game take place at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland — a first-time host for this location.