March Madness Explained for my Friends (And the world…you’re welcome, Earth)
Madness of March Basketball
March Madness indeed. This week’s My Weekly Spiral post is already living up to the name because the craziness of 2026 has fully arrived.
Earlier this week I was talking with a friend of mine who is beautiful, funny, smart—and apparently unaware of how the biggest sporting event of March works. We’re doing a bracket with the Pac Ave Pack (my mötley crew of friends), and Riley asked me to explain how March Madness works.
And just like that…BOOM.
Content idea.
So if you’ve ever nodded along pretending you understand the tournament, this one’s for you.
College basketball’s playoffs—commonly referred to as March Madness—run from mid-March to early April. On March 15th, the selection committee chooses the top 68 teams in the country and places them into four regions:
East
West
South
Midwest
Each region is seeded 1 through 16, with the No. 1 seeds being the best teams in the tournament.
Before the main bracket begins, the bottom eight teams play in a mini play-in tournament called The First Four, which trims the field down to the traditional 64-team bracket.
From there, it’s simple:
the highest seed plays the lowest seed.
So:
1 plays 16
2 plays 15
3 plays 14
…and so on.
Filling out a bracket is easy. You pick who you think will win each game in the first round, then advance those teams through the next rounds all the way to the national championship.
You can print a bracket and fill it out the old-fashioned way, or you can do it online with apps like ESPN Tournament Challenge. (Not sponsored…although ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS—if you’re reading this, my DMs are open.)
The Pac Ave Pack is putting in $5 each for our bracket challenge. With the number of degenerates in that group, the pot adds up pretty quickly.
Winner takes all.
Which means by Friday afternoon my bracket will probably be completely destroyed by a 12-seed from a school I’ve never heard of.
I’ll share my bracket on my Substack soon, so subscribe if you want to see my picks before they age horribly.