Why Is It Called March Madness? Where the Names Came From

Huff Gymnasium in Champaign held about 7,000 people, and in March 1939 that was nowhere near enough. More than 900 Illinois high schools had entered the boys' state basketball tournament that winter, one bracket for every school in the state regardless of size, and the sixteen survivors played the finals on the University of Illinois campus in front of crowds that had driven in from every county. Henry V. Porter, the assistant manager of the Illinois High School Association, wrote an essay about those crowds for the association's magazine. He called it "March Madness."

That is the answer. The NCAA tournament is called March Madness because of an Illinois high school official's 1939 essay, and because a television broadcaster who had spent years in Chicago, Brent Musburger, carried the phrase onto CBS's coverage of the college tournament in 1982. The NCAA did not coin it and for more than forty years had nothing to do with it. A federal appeals court eventually ruled, in 1996, that the name had come to belong to both tournaments at once.

Why it is called March Madness: three dates that explain the name

Three dates carry most of the story: 1939, 1982 and 1996. Porter published the phrase in the first, a network announcer moved it to a different sport's biggest event in the second, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided who owned it in the third.

Everything else on this page hangs off that sequence. The other tournament names, Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight and Final Four and the Big Dance, each have their own source, and two of them also began in state high school gyms rather than at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. The pattern is consistent enough to be worth stating as a judgment: almost none of the NCAA tournament's vocabulary was invented by the NCAA. It was borrowed from high school associations, sportswriters, coaches and broadcasters, and then registered.

1. 11939Henry V. Porter publishes the essay "March Madness" in the Illinois High School Association's magazine, about the boys' state tournament.
2. 21942Porter follows it with a poem, "Basketball Ides of March," which state associations reprint at tournament time.
3. 31940s to 1970sIllinois newspapers and the association itself use the phrase for the high school tournament, and only for that.
4. 41982Brent Musburger uses it during CBS's NCAA tournament coverage. The national press follows within a few seasons.
5. 51996A federal appeals court rules that the public now connects the name with both tournaments.
6. 62000The Illinois association and the NCAA pool their rights in one jointly held company.

The sequence as documented in Porter's writing, the Seventh Circuit's 1996 opinion and the later settlement. Dates for informal use on air and in print are the ones usually credited.

Name	Where it came from	Year usually credited
March Madness	Illinois high school state tournament; essay by Henry V. Porter	1939
Sweet Sixteen	State high school tournaments, most directly Kentucky's	Trademarked 1988
Elite Eight	Illinois high school state finals, after the field was cut to eight	1956
Final Four	A line in the Official Collegiate Basketball Guide	1975
The Big Dance	A remark by Marquette coach Al McGuire	1977
One Shining Moment	Song by David Barrett, first aired after the national final	1987

What Henry V. Porter wrote in 1939 and again in 1942

Porter was a former teacher and coach from central Illinois who joined the state association's staff in the late 1920s. He edited its monthly magazine, the Illinois High School Athlete, and wrote much of it himself. The March 1939 issue carried his essay under the two-word title, and it reads less like sportswriting than like an affectionate field study of a species, the small-town basketball fan in tournament season.

His fan gives up sleep without complaint. "When the March madness is on him," Porter wrote, "midnight jaunts of a hundred miles on successive nights make him even more alert the next day." The essay's best-known line is its defense of the whole business. A little March madness, Porter argued, may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel.

Note what the phrase meant to him. It was not about upsets or brackets, neither of which he mentions in the way a modern reader would expect. The madness was the public's, a seasonal fever among people who otherwise behaved sensibly, and Porter approved of it.

The poem that followed

Three years later he came back to the idea in verse. "Basketball Ides of March" appeared in 1942, by which point the country was at war and Porter had left Illinois, in 1940, to run the body now called the National Federation of State High School Associations. It opens with a picture any Midwesterner of the time would have recognized: gym lights gleaming like a beacon on a Friday night, and a million car engines humming toward them.

The later stanzas turn to the war and to the boys who had played in those gyms, and the poem ends on the words "a happy Madness of March." State associations around the country reprinted it in their own publications, which is how a phrase from one state's magazine first traveled.

The tournament behind the writing

The scale matters, because it explains the fever. Illinois had run a state tournament since 1908. Until 1972 it was a single-class event, so a consolidated rural school with a few dozen boys entered the same bracket as the largest schools in Chicago. Entries passed 900 in the late 1930s. District and regional and sectional rounds whittled that number down over several weeks, and the last sixteen went to Champaign.

One result shows what that structure could produce. In 1952 Hebron, a school with an enrollment of 98, won the whole thing. A tournament in which that was possible is the tournament Porter was writing about.

• 900Illinois schools in the 1939 state tournament
• 8Teams in the first NCAA tournament, 1939
• 43Years as a high school phrase before CBS used it
• 76Teams in each NCAA field from 2027

Illinois entries are the association's figure of more than 900 schools for the late 1930s, rounded down. The NCAA figures are field sizes for the men's championship.

Porter never saw the phrase leave high school sports. He spent the rest of his career at the national federation, where he worked on the rules and the equipment of the game, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor in 1960.

Four decades in which March Madness meant Illinois high schools

From the 1940s into the 1980s, a reader anywhere outside Illinois who saw the words "March Madness" would have had no particular reason to think of basketball at all. Inside the state there was no ambiguity. Newspapers used it in headlines over tournament previews. Car dealers and clothing stores used it in March advertising. Radio stations that carried the games used it between them.

The association took its time making the name official. By the early 1970s it was printing "March Madness" on tournament programs and selling it on merchandise, and in 1977 the Chicago sportswriter Jim Enright published a history of the event under the title March Madness: The Story of High School Basketball in Illinois. Licensing came after that. The Seventh Circuit's opinion records that the association had licensed the mark to companies making goods connected with the tournament, which is the step that turns a nickname into a piece of property someone can sue over.

Other states had their own vocabulary for the same event. Indiana had "Hoosier Hysteria." Kentucky had the "Sweet Sixteen," which comes up again below. These phrases did the same job Porter's did: they named a few weeks in late winter when a state's attention narrowed to one bracket.

What the Illinois association did not do, for a long time, was register the mark federally. That gap mattered later. A Chicago production company, Intersport, registered "March Madness" in 1989 for sports programming, and the association and Intersport spent the early 1990s sorting out which of them held what. They had pooled their rights by 1995. By then the bigger problem was already on national television every spring.

Brent Musburger, CBS and the tournament of 1982

The NCAA tournament changed networks in 1982. NBC had carried it through the 1970s, including the 1979 final between Magic Johnson's Michigan State and Larry Bird's Indiana State, which remains the reference point for the moment the event became a national property. CBS won the rights from the 1982 tournament onward and put Brent Musburger at the center of its studio coverage.

Musburger had been a Chicago man before he was a network man. He wrote for the Chicago's American newspaper in the 1960s and then worked at WBBM, the CBS station in the city, on radio and television. Anyone doing sports in Chicago in those years heard "March Madness" every year, attached to the high school tournament downstate. He has said as much himself in interviews over the years, recalling the phrase from local advertising around the state finals.

So when CBS needed a way to talk about a 48-team college tournament spread across more than a dozen sites and three weekends, he had two words ready. He used them on air during the 1982 tournament. That was the one that ended in the Louisiana Superdome with a North Carolina freshman named Michael Jordan hitting a jump shot from the left wing to beat Georgetown 63-62.

It stuck almost at once, and the reason is not complicated. The phrase is alliterative and it is accurate. The college tournament had just started producing the simultaneous, overlapping afternoon games that make its first week feel disorderly, and it was about to grow again: 52 teams in 1983, 53 in 1984, 64 in 1985. A name that had described crowded Illinois gyms fitted a crowded national bracket with no adjustment at all.

Newspapers took it from television. By the late 1980s it was ordinary usage in sports sections across the country, and most of the people using it had no idea it had a prior owner. The NCAA noticed what it had been handed. According to the Seventh Circuit, the association began licensing "March Madness" to makers of tournament-related goods in 1993 or 1994.

The trademark fight between the Illinois association and the NCAA

The lawsuit that settled the question was not filed against the NCAA. In 1996 a company called GTE Vantage, holding a license from the NCAA, put "March Madness" on the packaging of a CD-ROM computer game otherwise titled "NCAA Championship Basketball." The Illinois High School Association sued GTE Vantage for trademark infringement and asked a federal court to stop the sales.

The district court refused. The association appealed, and later that year the Seventh Circuit affirmed in an opinion by Chief Judge Richard Posner that is still taught in trademark courses.

What the court actually decided

Posner accepted that the Illinois association had used the name first, and for decades. He also accepted a fact nobody could dispute: the public, led by the media, now used the same two words for the NCAA tournament. The association had not caused that and neither, strictly, had the NCAA. Broadcasters and newspapers had.

His conclusion was that a trademark owner cannot pull back out of public use a name that the public has started applying to somebody else's product. He described "March Madness" as a dual-use term, one that designates both the Illinois high school tournament and the NCAA championship. The association kept its rights in connection with high school basketball. It could not prevent the NCAA or its licensees from using the name for the college tournament.

It is an unusual ruling, and an awkward one for anyone who thinks trademarks should simply go to whoever was there first. Its logic is that the law protects the public from confusion, and by 1996 an injunction would have created more confusion than it prevented.

The settlement

Neither side wanted to litigate every licensing deal for the next thirty years. In 2000 they formed the March Madness Athletic Association, a jointly held company that owned the mark and licensed it back in two directions: to the Illinois association for high school use, and to the NCAA for college use. The company also did the policing. It went to federal court in Texas over the internet address marchmadness.com, in a case against a company called Netfire, and won.

Year	What happened to the name
1989	Intersport, a Chicago production company, registers "March Madness" for sports programming
1993-94	The NCAA begins licensing the phrase to makers of tournament merchandise
1995	Intersport and the Illinois High School Association pool their rights
1996	The Seventh Circuit rules the name is a dual-use term
2000	The March Madness Athletic Association is formed to hold the mark
2010	The NCAA buys out Intersport's remaining interest for a reported $17.2 million

Who controls the March Madness name now, and what advertisers cannot say

The shared arrangement did not last in its original form. The NCAA bought out Intersport's remaining rights in 2010, at a widely reported price of $17.2 million, and the registrations have since passed from the jointly held company to the NCAA. The Illinois association still stages its state tournaments under the name it started with, and still describes them as the original March Madness. Control of the mark for everything else sits with the NCAA.

"Everything else" is a long list. The NCAA holds registrations for March Madness, Final Four, Women's Final Four, Elite Eight, Sweet Sixteen and Sweet 16, The Big Dance, Selection Sunday, First Four, March Mayhem and Road to the Final Four, among others. It registers defensively. A phrase that sounds enough like one of its own will draw an opposition filing even when the business involved has nothing to do with basketball.

1. 1The NCAAHolds the registrations and decides who may use the names commercially for college basketball.
2. 2Official partners and licenseesPay for the right to put the names in advertising, on packaging and on merchandise.
3. 3The Illinois High School AssociationContinues to use March Madness for its own state tournaments, the use the phrase was coined for.
4. 4News organizationsMay name the event freely in reporting and commentary; describing a tournament is not a trademark use.
5. 5Everyone else in businessNeeds permission to use the names in promotions, which is why so many do not use them.

A general description of how trademark control over the tournament names works in practice. It is not legal advice, and the terms of individual licenses are not public.

This is why a bar's chalkboard in the third week of March advertises specials for "the big tournament," and why a furniture store runs a "hoops madness" sale with a bracket-shaped graphic and no protected words on it. Those businesses are not sponsors. Using the registered name to sell something would invite a letter from the NCAA's lawyers, and the letters do go out every spring.

The same thing happens around the NFL's championship game, which non-sponsors call "the big game" for identical reasons.

What the trademark does not reach is talk. A newspaper can print the name in a headline, a broadcaster with no rights to the games can discuss them, and a website can explain where the phrase came from. Trademark law restricts using a name to sell goods or imply sponsorship. It does not restrict naming the thing itself.

The Big Dance, and why teams "go dancing"

Al McGuire coached Marquette for thirteen seasons and announced in the middle of the last one, 1976-77, that he was retiring. His team entered the NCAA tournament with seven losses and little expectation. McGuire, who was superstitious about clothes among other things, had been wearing the same blue blazer on the sideline.

The commonly told story is that a reporter asked him whether he would keep wearing it through the tournament. His answer, as it is usually retold, was that a coach has to wear the blue blazer when he goes to the big dance. The wording shifts from one telling to the next, which is a reason not to put it in quotation marks.

Marquette won five games and the national championship, beating North Carolina 67-59 in Atlanta on March 28, 1977. McGuire wept on the bench in the final seconds, then went into television, where he spent two decades as an analyst with a private vocabulary that he shared freely. An opponent's easy schedule was "cupcakes." A big man was an "aircraft carrier." A comfortable finish was "seashells and balloons."

Whether that single remark is the true first use of "big dance" for the tournament is hard to prove, and worth a hedge. The phrase was ordinary American slang for a prom or a formal, and a coach reaching for it as a metaphor is not surprising. What can be said is that the nickname is consistently traced to him, that it spread through the late 1970s and 1980s, and that it suited a man who was on air every March to repeat it.

The metaphor then grew its own family. A team that qualifies is "going dancing." A conference tournament champion has "punched its ticket," as if there were a door and a man checking stubs. A team left out stays home. The low seed that keeps winning is, by a different fairy tale, Cinderella at the ball. How automatic bids are won is covered in our guide to college basketball conference tournaments, which is where most of the ticket-punching actually happens.

Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight came from Kentucky and Illinois

Two more of the tournament's names were in use in high school gyms long before the NCAA printed them on a floor.

Sweet Sixteen

Kentucky does not divide its high schools into classes for its state basketball championship. Every school plays in one tournament, the state is carved into sixteen regions, and the sixteen regional champions meet at a single site. The boys' event dates to 1918 and has been played for decades at Rupp Arena in Lexington. Kentuckians have called it the Sweet Sixteen for generations.

Illinois used the same nickname for the same reason while its own finals had sixteen teams, so the phrase cannot be assigned to one state with total confidence. The trademark can. The Kentucky High School Athletic Association registered "Sweet Sixteen" in 1988.

The NCAA's regional semifinals had by then been informally called the same thing for some years, since a bracket of 64 produces sixteen teams after two rounds. Faced with the Illinois precedent of a long court fight, the two sides in this case negotiated. The NCAA uses "Sweet Sixteen" and "Sweet 16" for its tournaments with the Kentucky association's consent, and the Kentucky association keeps the name for high school play.

Elite Eight

This one is Illinois again. In 1956 the Illinois association cut its state finals from sixteen teams to eight. A tournament that had been the Sweet Sixteen needed a new nickname, and "Elite Eight" won out. The association later protected it as a trademark, during the same years it was fighting over the larger name, and the NCAA came to use it for its regional finals by arrangement with Illinois, not by coining it.

So the three best-known round names in American college basketball, the one for the whole event and the ones for its second weekend, all trace to state associations for teenagers. The NCAA's lawyers arrived decades after the sportswriters did.

Final Four: a guidebook line, then capital letters

The usual account credits Ed Chay, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Writing in the 1975 edition of the Official Collegiate Basketball Guide, he noted that Marquette had been one of the final four teams in the previous year's tournament. Lower case, descriptive, a phrase rather than a name.

Someone at the NCAA saw what it could be. The association began capitalizing Final Four in 1978 and later registered it.

There is a reasonable objection to the tidy version. Sportswriters had been describing the last four teams in a tournament as "the final four" well before 1975, because that is simply what they are, and examples from the 1960s are not hard to find in newspaper archives. Chay's line is better understood as the instance the NCAA noticed than as the first time the words appeared together.

The event itself, as opposed to its name, has a much longer story: the semifinals and final were not always played at one site on one weekend, the third-place game survived until 1981, and the move into football stadiums changed what a host city needs. All of that belongs to our Final Four history page.

Selection Sunday, the bubble, bracketology, Cinderella and a song

The supporting vocabulary arrived piece by piece, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, and mostly from television.

Selection Sunday. The committee had always chosen the field on a weekend in March. It became an event when CBS first televised the announcement live in 1982, the same spring Musburger brought the bigger name along. The NCAA later registered the phrase. How the committee builds the field is set out in our explainer on how the March Madness bracket works.

The bubble. A team "on the bubble" might or might not get in. The expression comes from American auto racing, specifically qualifying for the Indianapolis 500, where the slowest car provisionally in the field is on the bubble until someone faster bumps it out. College basketball borrowed it once the at-large field grew large enough for the last few places to be argued over.

Bracketology. Credited to Joe Lunardi, who in the mid-1990s was producing a postseason guide for the Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook and projecting the field in advance. A Philadelphia Inquirer story in 1996 is usually cited as the first to call him a "bracketologist," and the noun followed him to ESPN.

Cinderella. Far older than the others. American sportswriters were applying the fairy tale to unexpected winners in the first half of the twentieth century, and in college basketball it is most often pinned to City College of New York's 1950 team, which won the NIT and the NCAA tournament in the same month. What the word should and should not cover is taken up on our page about the lowest seeds to win and reach the Final Four.

"One Shining Moment." David Barrett, a singer-songwriter from Michigan, wrote it in 1986. CBS had planned to use it after the Super Bowl in January 1987 and ran out of airtime, so it was held for the basketball final that spring, Indiana's one-point win over Syracuse. It has closed the men's tournament broadcast ever since, re-recorded over the years by Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross and Jennifer Hudson.

One term belongs to the other side of the ledger. "First Four," for the opening games introduced when the field went to 68 in 2011, was an NCAA coinage from the start, which may be why nobody ever said it with much affection. It is being retired in favor of the March Madness Opening Round when the field grows to 76 in 2027.

1939, March Madness coined in Illinois8teams

1975, "final four" in the guide32teams

1977, the Big Dance32teams

1982, March Madness on CBS48teams

2022, women's tournament branded68teams

2027, Opening Round begins76teams

Number of teams in the NCAA Division I men's tournament in the season each term is usually dated to. The field for 2027 is the one the NCAA announced in May 2026.

Show the numbers

Size of the men's field in the years the names arrived

Item	Value
1939, March Madness coined in Illinois	8teams
1975, "final four" in the guide	32teams
1977, the Big Dance	32teams
1982, March Madness on CBS	48teams
2022, women's tournament branded	68teams
2027, Opening Round begins	76teams

When the women's tournament became March Madness too

For forty years the name was applied to only half of the NCAA's Division I basketball championships. The women's tournament, first played in 1982, was marketed as the NCAA Women's Basketball Championship, with a Women's Final Four at the end of it. The words "March Madness" appeared on the men's courts, the men's merchandise and the men's social media accounts.

That ended after the 2021 tournaments, both played in controlled environments because of the pandemic, the men's in Indiana and the women's in Texas. Oregon forward Sedona Prince posted a short video comparing the two weight rooms: a full training facility for the men, a single rack of dumbbells for the women. The NCAA commissioned an outside review from the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink. Its report, published that August, found disparities that went well beyond equipment, and among its specific findings was that withholding the March Madness brand from the women's tournament held back its value.

The NCAA extended the name to the women's championship beginning with the 2022 tournament, the same year the women's field grew from 64 to 68. The format, the campus sites and the history of that event are the subject of our guide to the women's NCAA tournament.

One oddity is left over. The name says March, and both finals are played in April. The men's championship game has been a first-Monday-in-April fixture for most of the 64-team era, and in recent years the women's final has been played the day before. Nobody has seriously proposed renaming it. In practice the phrase now covers the entire event from Selection Sunday to the last net coming down, whatever the calendar says.

Why the tournament sits in March in the first place

The month was fixed long before the name reached it. College basketball is a winter sport with a season that tips off in early November, and its shape has barely changed in a century: nonconference games before the holidays, conference games from January through the first days of March, then a postseason.

The first NCAA tournament was played in March 1939, a few weeks after Porter's essay went to press. It had eight teams. The final was held on March 27 at Patten Gymnasium on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, Illinois, where Oregon beat Ohio State 46-33. That the college tournament's first champion was crowned in the same state, in the same month, as the high school official's essay is a coincidence, and a neat one.

The NCAA event was not even the senior tournament at the time. The National Invitation Tournament had started a year earlier at Madison Square Garden and was the more prestigious of the two for a good while; its story is told in our NIT explainer. Both were March events because that is when the regular season ran out.

Three things then held the calendar in place as the bracket grew from 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 and beyond.

Conference tournaments came first. As more leagues decided their automatic bid with a tournament of their own, the first two weeks of March filled with them, and the national bracket could not start until they were finished.

Television came second. A three-week event beginning in mid-March lands in a quiet part of the American sports year, after the Super Bowl in February and before baseball's Opening Day and the Masters in early April. Networks have paid heavily for that position and have no reason to give it up.

The academic year is the last constraint. The tournament has to be done before spring semesters wind down, which leaves no room to drift later. Every expansion has therefore been absorbed by adding days at the front, in the week after Selection Sunday, and the first full Thursday of games has stayed where it was.

For the wider sport that surrounds those three weeks, the rules and tactics pieces on our basketball hub are the place to keep reading. The numbers that the madness produces, round by round, are on our page about first-round upsets by seed.