Since 2011, 68 teams have participated in the March Madness, 32 of which are the best teams from each conference. At the same time, in 31 of them, the triumphants are determined by the results of a separate tournament rather than the entire regular season. For the most part, March Madness interests not only sports fans but also ordinary people (primarily Americans) not only with its exciting matches, abundance of young talent, and charisma of coaches. For a large part of the US population, this event is a great reason to visit a bookmaker’s office.
March Madness is the final National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I national championship basketball tournament. It runs from mid-March through early April.
Up until the early eighties, college basketball was more of a cult item than a truly notable sporting event. It was primarily of interest to college and university students, sports fans in cities that did not have professional basketball teams but did have college teams, and, of course, scouts and coaches of NBA clubs and other smaller leagues. But when ESPN broadcast all NCAA games live and in full, the whole of America took notice.
In 1982, CBS commentator Brent Musburger first characterized the national championship playoffs with the fair term “March Madness” – and the degree of that madness has not diminished at all since.
The NCAA’s premier division features 336 teams divided into 31 conferences based on geography. Only 68 teams qualify for the playoffs. The winners of their conferences automatically qualify for the March games. To eliminate the randomness factor, the remaining participants are determined by a special committee that evaluates the number of wins, the presence of strong opponents in the conference playoffs, and the strength of the team’s players.
Since teams from different conferences rarely play each other during the regular season, it’s virtually impossible to assess their real strength, so the tournament’s seeded system, which inevitably pits top teams against gray, unremarkable squads that barely made the playoffs, creates a lot of surprises.
What is March Madness?
March Madness is an unofficial name of one of the most massive and popular sports tournaments — playoffs among college basketball teams. The first March Madness, back in 1939, was an eight-team competition. Today, 68 teams participate in the tournament.
In terms of visual identity, March Madness is very televisual, as the main audience of the tournament watches it on TV, hence its logo is built for the TV screen, with intense colors and massive shapes.
The March Madness logo, used at the beginning of the 2010s, was the brightest of all. The three-dimensional “NCAA” lettering on the upper part of the badge was executed in a glossy and gradient light shade of blue, balancing the slight shades on the black-and-white “March Madness” banner under it. The lettering was placed on a background with the orange basketball on it, and accompanied by a black plate with the emblems of TV channels on it.
For the 2015 March Madness season the logo of the tournament was refined and simplified in terms of colors and volumes. The gradients were removed from the composition, and the basketball was enlarged and brightened up. The color contrast got more intense, creating distinctive accents on the characters and channels’ emblems.
The redesign of 2016 made the March Madness logo voluminous again. The three-dimensional shapes were back and the glossy gradients too. The blue of the “NCAA” got lighter and smoother, and the overall composition looked more balanced and professional than on the badge from 2011. However, the composition of the March Madness badge remained the same, and all of the elements from the original version were kept almost as they were.
In 2022 the March Madness logo was completely remade. The iconic orange basketball was removed from the composition, and the color palette of the new badge turned black, white, and blue. The white uppercase lettering is now placed on a solid black banner with the light-blue NCAA emblem in the upper left corner. The banner is decorated by blue and gray lines, symbolizing connection, and cooperation.
The bold uppercase lettering from the official March Madness logo is set in a narrowed slanted sans-serif typeface, based on one of the commercial fonts, such as Cutmark, Spaceland, or Pawl, but with some minor modifications.
As for the color palette of the March Madness visual identity, it is composed of black, white, and two shades of blue, making up a very intense and eye-catching combination, that looks powerful and confident.