While the spring season has a lot to offer, like pleasant weather and longer days, it is also famous for March Madness. The nationwide tournament has undoubtedly grown in popularity for its chaotic, unpredictable nature. However, average viewers often overlook its origins, history, and the title “March Madness.”
Before March Madness, college basketball had the National Invitation Tournament. The following year, 1939, the NCAA launched the tournament, but it included only eight teams. Ultimately, Oregon won the first official short tournament.
“H.V. Porter, an Illinois High School Association official, first used the term ‘March Madness’ in a March 1939 essay about the excitement surrounding the state high school basketball tournament,” Dana E. Lee and Alonzo Olmedo of the ESPN website explain.
“March Madness” wouldn’t enter the college basketball lexicon until broadcaster Brent Musburger popularized the term during the 1982 NCAA men’s tournament.”
As the years went on, the tournament grew larger and more popular among the public, especially as television broadcasting became more accessible in the 1960’s.
Much of the 1970s was spent proposing, discussing, and voting on expanding and reformatting the tournament by the NCAA basketball committee.
The total number of schools included in the March Madness national tournament would surely increase dramatically.
“The NCAA expanded the field to forty in 1979, then to forty-eight in 1980 (with no limit on the number of teams per conference), then to sixty-four in 1985, and finally to sixty-eight in 2011,” according to the Organization of American Historians website.
As the tournament grew in size over the years, so did its popularity and broadcasting income. CBS and Turner Broadcasting System’s income was an astonishing $10.8 billion between 2011 and 2025.
While this article covers the history of men’s March Madness, as of 2022, women’s March Madness now also includes 68 teams in its tournament. Since then, the women’s tournament has been granted the use of the trademarked brand “March Madness” to grow the popularity of women’s college basketball.
