Why does everyone go mad in March?
Welcome back to the Learn English podcast. The podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode I want to talk a little more about some American culture things and in particular a basketball tournament that starts in the month of March and is very popular here in the United States.
the name of this tournament is March Madness and it doesn't actually end in March it only starts in March but it is incredibly popular and I don't know if any other country has something similar.
It might be just one of those things that is very American.
So on today's episode we're going to discuss what this is, how it started, and how you could take part in it if you are interested.
If If you're interested in learning about this while practicing your listening comprehension and building your English vocabulary, then follow along because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode.
You will find helpful links, like how to take a lesson with me, and you'll also find the vocabulary list that I used in the episode.
You can take this list, study it and use it to build your English vocabulary.
Now let's talk about March Madness.
This is a basketball tournament that occurs every year here in the United States and it is a college basketball tournament.
This is for teams that have college basketball teams at the very highest level.
They get selected and they're able to go into this tournament and that tournament determines the winner of the National Championship.
Now I know from talking to my students who have been learning English online with me that college sports is not really as popular in other countries as it is in the United States.
The United States has a very strong college sports program.
It is overseen by something called the NCAA, which is the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
They are the ones who oversee college sports in general, and they are the ones who put on this tournament every year.
When you do play sports in college, there are different rankings.
Think of this in terms of leagues about how good a particular team is or a particular university is.
there are three divisions, Division 3, Division 2 and Division 1.
Division 1 is the highest tier those are for the best teams and this tournament is for those Division 1 schools, the best teams in the country.
For the tournament it consists of 64 teams. It didn't always have that many teams. When it first started in 1939.
It only had, I think, eight teams, but it has continued to grow and expand and now it is at 64 teams. These 64 teams get selected and they get seated for the tournament.
Seating is when you determine what the ranking of a team is.
Are they number one, number two, number three.
This occurs for four different areas of the tournament.
So you seed these teams into these four different areas, which means each area has 16 teams. So they are seeded one through 16.
The number one seed would be considered the best team in that particular area for the tournament, and the number 16 team would of course be considered the worst. They're not a bad team because obviously they made the tournament, that is a big step.
A lot of teams don't even make the tournament every year, but it is considered to be the weakest team in that particular part of the bracket.
This tournament is a single elimination tournament, which means that if you lose you go home.
This might be different from other tournaments think of the World Cup or the Euro Cup or Copa America for example.
Those you have that group play stage where you get out of group play first this is not like that this is single elimination which means you do go home if you lose a game.
It is exciting to see your college make the tournament of course people start cheering for whatever college or university that they went to and then it's exciting because you're really hoping they win.
If they lose, they go home, so you want them to win.
You want them to keep going on further and further in the tournament.
Another reason why it is so popular is because of this whole bracket idea and the different matchups between the teams. There are a lot of people who at the beginning of a tournament make a bracket and they try to select the winners.
So the first round of matches is set once the teams are seated.
You know exactly who is going to play who in the first game, but after that you don't know.
You're just trying to hope and see who wins and think of who will eventually make it to the final and become the national champion.
It has become part of the culture here in the US to make a bracket at the beginning of the March Madness tournament.
Of course not everyone does, but if you are a college basketball fan, if you're someone who likes to watch the tournament, or if you're someone who just maybe wants to make a little bit of money, you can make one of these brackets.
When Barack Obama was president, he would actually come out in front of the media and show his bracket and explain why he was selecting one team versus the other.
That helped popularize this idea of making a bracket.
And there's also some giveaways or prizes for people if they are able to correctly predict who is going to win.
For example, there is someone here called Warren Buffett.
He is a billionaire.
He is one of the richest men in the world and every year he has a prize for his people who work for him, for his employees.
If they are able to correctly predict a certain amount of games, they could win 1 million dollars.
That is a huge prize I would love to win that prize and one year I think maybe a decade ago or so Warren Buffett made it a public thing.
If you had a perfect bracket, if you were able to correctly predict every single game you could win some crazy amount of money.
I remember I entered, my cousin entered, a lot of people I knew entered because you know there's nothing really to lose you could win some really big prize that would be amazing and change your life and so that adds to the excitement.
Other companies do similar things with having people submit their brackets for a chance to win.
Their prizes might not be as crazy as a million dollars but you might win something it's very exciting.
I can say that no one won when Warren Buffett made that thing public when everybody had a chance to win and I also don't think his employees have won.
I might be wrong on that.
Those are some free prizes but of course there are also some things that are not free.
There are a lot of people who make brackets and then bet money on them or bet money on just individual games.
Sports betting is legal in a lot of the United States and you can bet online in a lot of different states.
We can't do that here in California but in a lot of states you can, and there are a lot of people who do bet money on this tournament.
It is estimated that about three billion dollars will be gambled during the course of the tournament and that is for legal betting.
Of course there's bets that people might make with their friends, that's not recorded or tracked by anything, maybe you and your friend have a bet who's going to have the best bracket, and maybe you bet a few dollars.
There's also some illegal betting.
Like I said, California has some restrictions, so sometimes people want to get around those restrictions and bet in some illegal means.
Those are all things that do occur, so the number of bets and the total amount of money is definitely higher than 3 billion dollars, but that just gives you an estimate of how popular this tournament is and how much money does get bet or get wagered on the tournament itself.
Now for March Madness there are actually two tournaments there is the men's tournament and the women's tournament.
Both have had increases in popularity though traditionally the men's tournament was the one that was most watched that got the most amount of viewers but the women's tournament has become increasingly popular in the last few years.
Overall the men's tournament averages about 10 million views per game.
The women's tournament averages about 2 million, a little over 2 million.
However, for the finale, the final game to actually determine the national championship last year, the men's tournament got 14 .8 million views, while the women's final got 18 .9 million views.
That means that the women's national championship game actually got more viewers than the men's and it was in part due To some really big stars when in particular her name is Caitlin Clark.
She was a senior Which means it was her last year She was going to be playing college basketball before she became a professional when we have someone who goes from college to the professional Leagues we call that turning pro.
So it was her last year before she turned pro and that's a lot of excitement.
She is considered to be the best players.
She has the scoring record. She's a very popular player.
Last year she was in the final game with her team, and it got a lot of views because people really did want to watch her.
Now when we talk about the teams that are playing, there are always the favorites.
The favorites are the teams that are very highly seated, maybe the number one or the number two team in the country, and these are usually teams that make it every year that have a very strong basketball program and every year they make the tournament and they're expected to do very well in it.
These teams are called Blue Bloods and this is limited.
There's only maybe six to eight teams that are in that pool but if you hear that term Blue Bloods, that's what they're referring to, these very strong programs that are expected to always do well.
The opposite of that is the Cinderella team.
The Cinderella team is referring to that fairy tale.
Think of that Disney movie Cinderella, this girl who doesn't really have very nice clothes, who doesn't live in a very nice way.
She has to clean up after her family, people don't really think much of her.
And then she goes to the ball and she has this beautiful dress and she's gorgeous right?
That's what the Cinderella story is.
So the Cinderella story is the team that doesn't really have the best staff, maybe doesn't have the best players, is not expected to do well.
Maybe the 16th seed, the 15th seed and they are expected to really just lose in the first round and go home.
When they win though, when they start winning and they continue on in the tournament and they are causing all these upsets, that is when they become this Cinderella team, and that's called a Cinderella story.
If you want to relate this to the world cup, think of South Korea or Morocco, for example, teams that start beating teams that they weren't supposed to, and people start cheering for them because they weren't the team that was expected to win.
They were the underdog.
So the underdog is the team that is expected to lose to the favorite.
And so when the underdog starts winning, they get called the Cinderella team.
Now, sadly, Cinderella has to leave the ball, right?
When the clock strikes midnight, she has to run home because the magic wears off.
And that's also part of this, the Cinderella story.
Eventually, the magic will wear off, and the team will lose, and they'll leave the tournament.
I actually don't think a Cinderella team has won a very low -ranked team.
I could be wrong, I don't know everything, but usually they do leave after a couple of rounds.
Now, when we talk about the rounds, every time they have a game, half of the field leaves, right, half of the teams in the tournament leave. So it starts with 64, and then it goes to 32, and then it goes to 16.
When it gets to 16, they call that round the sweet 16.
You'll hear that a lot, which teams are making the sweet 16, which ones are expected to make the sweet 16, which ones do which ones don't.
When you play that round, half of the teams go home again and so you have the Elite Eight.
These are the eight teams that have made it to this part of the tournament.
They are, of course, really, really good teams by now because there's only eight left, and that's why they get called Elite.
Elite usually means better than the average thing, right?
Very prestigious, very good.
So these are the Elite Eight.
Then from that you get the Final Four.
The Final Four are the four teams that are now in the running for the National Championship.
You play one more round to get to the semifinals and then the Final Two teams play for the National Championship in April.
Now everything isn't perfect when it comes to these tournaments and the College Association in general.
Up until very recently college athletes did not get paid, but there was a lot of money that went into college sports and that was made from college sports.
Like I said, college sports are very, very popular in the U .S. These national championship games sell out for basketball, for American football, is extremely popular.
The coaches would get paid millions of dollars.
in most of the States in the US, the highest paid public employee is a football coach or a basketball coach. They get paid millions of dollars, the school makes millions or even billions of dollars, and up until very recently the college athletes didn't make anything.
About a decade ago one of the college players who was in this tournament said that he was in this tournament millions of dollars billions of dollars were being made and he did not even have enough money to buy food he could not go buy lunch and that brought a lot of attention to this issue about college athletes not being paid and really not having money to eat when there's so much money that's being made from them being in this tournament and just in general and playing college sports there were lawsuits to try to change this and in 2021 the Supreme Court ruled that athletes could make money
from their image. That means that they could have sponsors, they could do commercials, they could do sponsored posts on social media, like on Instagram.
And since then, a lot of athletes have started making money.
Of course the best athletes in the country were the ones who started making money, or maybe the best -looking athletes were the ones who were able to be in commercials, but at least it was something, some way for them to get some type of income when they were involved in this because when it comes to the actual broadcast companies CBS is the one who airs the tournament you can watch the CBS channel and watch these games.
They pay about 1 .1 billion dollars to the NCAA just to show the games and if they're paying that much you know that they are making more money than that from selling ads during the game so you can really see how much money is around this one tournament.
That's not even just the regular season.
That's just this particular tournament.
And you can see how much money is being made versus how much the athletes were not making before 2021.
Another controversy around the tournament is always seeding.
People always complain about which teams make the tournament which don't, maybe some people thought were good enough to be in the top 64 and they weren't, or people thought this particular team should be the number one seed, the number one team, and maybe they got ranked the number three.
And people will complain about the seeding, you'll see some controversy every time the brackets get announced, every time the seeding comes out.
There's always people who are angry, but I feel like that's just what sports fans do, right?
They kind of complain about what's happening and thinking that their team was not given what they should have been given.
And the final controversy really has to do with the gender differences.
Up until very recently the two tournaments were not seen as the same.
The men's team got all of this money, got all of this revenue and that meant that they got really good facilities.
What we mean by facilities is their locker room, the gyms, the courts that they practice on.
the things that they have access to.
A couple of years ago, there was a picture posted by people who were in the women's tournament and it showed their facilities and it showed just how sad those facilities looked, how cheap, how they didn't get the support or financial resources that they needed in order to have these really nice facilities that the men's side did and that caused a lot of controversy people complained.
Like I said, the women's side has become much more popular in recent years and women's basketball has just become way more popular in the last five or six years.
So that has been getting better, the women do have more access to the same facilities, so there has been some issues with that, some attention brought to that and it definitely has gotten better in recent years.
If you want to watch March Madness, of course, you can start right now.
The tournament has already started but we're really in the middle of it.
There are games going on right now if you're interested in watching them and seeing what all the attention is about, what all the fuss is about, as we would say.
And the actual championship games themselves are not until April.
So the women's national championship will be on April 6th.
The men's will be on April 7th.
So if you are interested, you can watch those games and that'll be the end.
That'll be end of the tournament, which I know is a little bit funny.
We say March Madness, but it ends in April.
Of course all of the seating and the brackets and all the excitement Starts in the middle of March and takes over the end of the month, which is why we call it March Madness I hope you enjoyed this episode I hope you found it interesting and learned a little bit about this part of American culture Learned these things that Americans do that maybe people in other countries Don't and I also hope you learned some new vocabulary terms. A reminder to look at the description of this podcast episode so you can find that vocabulary list, so you can study it, and hopefully start using these terms in conversation yourself.
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