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2012 March Madness Bracket Contest

2012 March Madness Betting

March Madness Betting With the earliest NCAA Tournament betting odds for every matchup during March Madness, there is no reason to not join BookMaker sportsbook! Our writers provide all the injuries, line movements and analyses to handicap every college basketball game on the betting board. The NCAA Tournament is set to take place March 13 through April 2, 2012, with the championship game played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.

NCAA Betting Online: The greatest three-week stretch on the sports calendar is when the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament takes place. For college hoops fans, this period has simply become known as March Madness.

The single-elimination tournament features 68 college basketball teams that all have a chance at being crowned national champion. The tourney was created in 1939 and is organized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The field consists of 31 teams that were conference champions during the regular season. Thirty of these 31 automatic bids are the winners of their respective conference tournaments. The Ivy League does not hold a conference tournament so the school with the best regular-season record earns the berth.

The other 37 teams invited to partake in March Madness get in with at-large bids. These programs are picked by an NCAA Selection Committee.

The Selection Committee also decides where the 68 teams are seeded and placed in the tournament bracket.

After the first two play-in games, otherwise known as The First Four, each of the four regions is left with 16 teams. These teams are seeded 1 through 16 by the NCAA Selection Committee. The No. 1 seed plays the No. 16 seed in the opening round, No. 2 plays No. 15, No. 3 plays No. 14 and so on. After the Round of 64, the structure of the bracket advances winners to a predetermined spot.

The third round of the tourney is also called the Round of 32. The regional semifinals have been dubbed the Sweet 16. The regional finals are commonly referred to as the Elite Eight. When there are only four remaining teams in the tournament that round is known as the Final Four. The culminating title game is called the National Championship.

The term “Cinderella” often gets thrown around during March Madness. This refers to an underdog team, usually a small school or a high seed, which advances to or past the Sweet 16 round of the tournament. The Cinderella label became popular when the City College of New York won the tournament in 1950. 

The phrase “March Madness” originated in 1939 when H. V. Porter published an essay with it as the title. He recycled the phrase in a 1942 poem called “Basketball Ides of March.”

These references came before the NCAA Tournament and were mostly used to describe end of season high school basketball tournaments. Fans started borrowing the phrase in the early 1980s in association with college basketball. CBS commentator Brent Musburger was the first to use it during a telecast.

March Madness is a registered trademark currently owned by the NCAA.

The NCAA Tournament has been televised since 1969. With CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV providing coverage in 2011, all 67 games of March Madness were available for viewing on a national scale.

The Big Dance has gained immense popularity in the American culture over the last 30 years. Today, millions of fans enter betting pools where they fill out brackets and predict winners for every round of the tournament.

The month of March generates a firestorm of madness for college basketball fans across the nation. BookMaker has NCAA Tournament betting odds for every game of March Madness. You can make a futures bet and predict the national champion, wager on individual college basketball games or use BookMaker’s live betting feature to wager on matchups while they’re happening.

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