The NCAA Division I men’s and women’s bas­ket­ball tour­na­ments pro­vide the most excit­ing level of col­le­giate com­pe­ti­tion and drama.

March Madness is action packed. It’s filled with heart­break and jubi­la­tion. The final 60 sec­onds of a game can be five min­utes of hold­ing your breath. Every year there are Cinderella teams that “upset” the national powerhouses.

College bas­ket­ball fans turn up in droves when March Madness begins. This year more than 5.9 mil­lion brack­ets were filled out on espn​.com for the men’s tour­na­ment alone. Many peo­ple use the tour­na­ments as a means to gam­ble against their friends, fam­ily or cowork­ers. For oth­ers, they sim­ply play for brag­ging rights.

There are col­lege bas­ket­ball fans every­where and Ferris is cer­tainly no excep­tion. There is a bracket hang­ing in the Rankin Student Center that has the updated win­ners from each of the first three rounds of action.

There is some­thing mys­tique about the lore of col­lege bas­ket­ball that brings fans and non­fans together. You cer­tainly don’t have to be a bas­ket­ball fan to enjoy March Madness. Many peo­ple don’t watch at all dur­ing the reg­u­lar sea­son, but come tour­ney time, they are tuned in to every game.

Doesn’t it seem like more often than not it’s those who don’t fol­low the sport closely who end up win­ning the office pool? There is no log­i­cal expla­na­tion for how the lady in the cor­ner cubi­cle who never talks to any­one wins because she picked teams based on mascots.

The beauty of the March Madness is that teams like Morehead State, Virginia Commonwealth and Richmond defeat well-known pro­grams such as Louisville, Georgetown and Vanderbilt. There is never a way to know which team will make a “sur­pris­ing” run to the Elite Eight like Davidson did dur­ing the 2008 tournament.

No mat­ter what team you picked to win a par­tic­u­lar game, it always seems like peo­ple are nat­u­rally drawn to the lesser-known under­dogs. Sure they may cost you a few dol­lars in the end, but for many teams it will be their only chance to play against the top teams in the nation.

While the semes­ter rolls along and exams, projects, and pre­sen­ta­tions loom in the near future, stu­dents don’t miss the oppor­tu­nity to take a study break and check their brack­ets. n