2012 Final Four NCAA Men's Basketball Championship

March Madness Betting Online: With the earliest NCAA Tournament betting odds for every game during the Final Four, there is no reason to not join BookMaker sportsbook! Our writers provide all the injuries, line movements and analyses to handicap every college basketball contest on the betting board. The Final Four is set to take place March 31, 2012, with the games played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.

Countless hours are exhausted filling out NCAA Tournament brackets every year. An estimated $3.8 billion is sacrificed in work productivity by millions of people sifting through matchups, injuries, statistics, storylines, power ratings, pundit predictions and more while seeking to win their office pool.

The Final Four is the penultimate round of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. Fans and bettors across the globe don’t leave their seat for one minute that Saturday because the entertainment provided by the four remaining teams is exhilarating.

Following the Elite Eight round, the four teams that won their region must travel from different destinations to convene at one venue for the final two rounds of the tourney. The two schools that win their Final Four matchups advance to the national title game. The winner of that contest, held two days later on Monday, is crowned college basketball’s national champion.

Once the 64-team field is set for March Madness, teams must win four consecutive games to advance to the Final Four. A six-game winning streak is required to win it all.

The phrase “Final Four” originated in 1975 when Cleveland Plain Dealer sportswriter Ed Chay used it in an article. He referenced the Marquette University basketball team by saying it "was one of the final four" in the tournament the previous year.

The NCAA marketing department loved the term so much they trademarked “Final Four” in 1978.

Some high school basketball purists claim that "Final Four" was first used in connection with the annual tournaments held in Indiana and Kentucky. This could be true considering the phrases “March Madness,” “Sweet 16” and “Elite Eight” were first coined at these tournaments.

Final Four is more commonly used in the United States compared to other countries, which prefer to use the term “semifinals” when referring to the game or games leading up to a championship.

The NCAA also uses Final Four for the Men's and Women's Volleyball Championship. A variation of the phrase -- the Frozen Four -- derived in college hockey to describe the last four teams in its tournament.

One of the most famous Final Four games came in 1991 as Duke and UNLV squared off. The defending champion Rebels came into the contest with a perfect record and were led by Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon. After seventeen ties and 25 lead changes, the Blue Devils climbed back from a late deficit to secure a 79-77 victory.

In 2011, the Final Four was comprised of an unlikely group of schools. Connecticut was the highest of the four seeds at No. 3, which made that year’s Final Four the first in tournament history without a No. 1 or No. 2 seed involved.

The combination of team seeds (No. 3 UConn, No. 4 Kentucky, No. 8 Butler, No. 11 VCU) was the highest total in NCAA Tournament history. The Final Four matchup between Butler and Virginia Commonwealth also had the highest collective seed total in history.

VCU joined LSU (1986) and George Mason (2006) as the lowest seeds ever to advance to the Final Four.

BookMaker has NCAA Tournament betting odds for every game of the Final Four. You can make a futures bet and predict the national champion, wager on the four individual college basketball games or use BookMaker’s live betting feature to wager on matchups while they’re happening.

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