March Madness is near and after a very exciting year last year, expectations have never been higher. March Madness is the college basketball championship which is a king of the court style playoff where the winner must win 6 consecutive games as each opponent gets progressively harder than the last. People from all over the U.S. create a bracket and root for underdogs to make a deep push, even being promised a 1 billion dollar prize to anyone who can predict all 126 games. Although no one has made it even halfway through the tournament without getting eliminated, 80-100 million brackets are submitted annually. This is because the chance of assembling a perfect bracket is 1 in 2 to the 67th power or 1 in 147,573,952,589,676,412,928. Despite this, it does not stop people from taking 30 minutes out of their day to make a bracket and root for their teams to make it all the way. And this certainly does not exclude FWPA. Although FWPA lacks many college basketball fans, more people follow the tournament than you might think. More than 50 people were asked who they were rooting for in this year’s tournament, and of those, just under 50 percent of people were rooting for University of Washington. Although they are still fighting for just a spot in the playoffs, hope is not yet lost. “I just root for whoever the underdog is, hoping for a Cinderella story this year,” Juan Tobar exclaims as he gets ready for an exciting tournament waiting to happen. This is a time where we see people from all over the United States come together to watch as our favorite team tries their hardest to make a big push and eventually host the Naismith trophy and bring it home.
