The tournament has become part of American popular culture through bracket contests that award money and other prizes for correctly predicting the outcomes of the most games.

Founded by the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association one year before the NCAA tournament, the NIT was held entirely in New York City at Madison Square Garden.

This was in response to eighth-ranked Marquette declining its invitation in 1970 and instead participating in and winning the NIT after coach Al McGuire complained about their regional placement.

Explaining the reasoning for this format, selection committee chairman Dan Guerrero said, "We felt if we were going to expand the field it would create better drama for the tournament if the First Four was much more exciting.

Once the vast scale of the pandemic was understood, the NCAA cancelled the tournament, making it the first edition not to be held, and decided against releasing the brackets that the Selection Committee had been working on.

[citation needed] The Selection Committee, which includes conference commissioners and university athletic directors appointed by the NCAA, determines the bracket during the week before the tournament.

Finally, the committee will attempt to ensure that a team is not moved out of their preferred geographical region an inordinate number of times based on their placement in the previous two tournaments.

[13] This tradition is credited to Everett Case, the coach of North Carolina State, who stood on his players' shoulders to accomplish the feat after the Wolfpack won the Southern Conference tournament in 1947.

A 2012 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research explores how the March tournament affects the way that professional teams behave in the June draft.

While three of TNT's NBA voices, Kevin Harlan, Ian Eagle, and Spero Dedes are already employed by CBS in other capacities, TNT also lends analysts Stan Van Gundy, Jim Jackson, Grant Hill, and Steve Smith, secondary play-by-play man Brian Anderson, and reporters Allie LaForce and Lauren Shehadi, the latter being from TBS's MLB coverage, to CBS.

In turn, CBS announcers Brad Nessler, Andrew Catalon, and Tom McCarthy appear on WBD network broadcasts along with analysts Jim Spanarkel, Bill Raftery, Dan Bonner, Steve Lappas, Brendan Haywood, and Avery Johnson, as well as reporters Tracy Wolfson, Evan Washburn, A. J. Ross, and Jon Rothstein, and rules analyst Gene Steratore.

That exclusivity extended to the entire Final Four as well, but after the 2013 tournament Turner Sports elected to exercise a contractual option for 2014 and 2015 giving TBS broadcast rights to the national semifinal matchups.

[citation needed] However, ESPN became a victim of its own success, as CBS was awarded the rights to cover all games of the NCAA tournament, starting in 1991.

[citation needed] In 1999, DirecTV began broadcasting all games otherwise not shown on local television with its Mega March Madness premium package.

[28] In 2004, CBS began selling viewers access to March Madness On Demand, which provided games not otherwise shown on broadcast television; the service was free for AOL subscribers.

In 2013, the service, now renamed March Madness Live, was again made free, but uses Turner's rights and infrastructure for TV Everywhere, which requires sign-in though the password of a customer's cable or satellite provider to watch games, both via PC/Mac and mobile devices.

CBSSN is scheduled to continue broadcasting the official pregame and postgame shows and press conferences from the teams involved, along with overnight replays.

Local stations broadcasting in both digital and analog had the option of airing separate games on their HD and SD channels, to take advantage of the available high definition coverage.

However, during the tenure of UNLV's coach at the time, Jerry Tarkanian, the Runnin' Rebels were widely viewed as a major program despite their conference affiliation (a situation similar to that of Gonzaga since the first years of the 21st century).

In September 2012, the NCAA began preliminary discussions on the possibility of returning occasional Final Fours to basketball-specific arenas in major metropolitan areas.

According to ESPN.com writer Andy Katz, when Mark Lewis was hired as NCAA executive vice president for championships during 2012, "he took out a United States map and saw that both coasts are largely left off from hosting the Final Four.

"[43] Lewis added in an interview with Katz, I don't know where this will lead, if anywhere, but the right thing is to sit down and have these conversations and see if we want our championship in more than eight cities or do we like playing exclusively in domes.

Kentucky (1958 in Louisville), UCLA (1968 and 1972 in Los Angeles, 1975 in San Diego), and North Carolina State (1974 in Greensboro) won the national title; Louisville (1959 at its home arena, Freedom Hall); Purdue (1980 in Indianapolis) lost in the Final Four; and California (1960 in the San Francisco Bay Area), Duke (1994 in Charlotte), Michigan State (2009 in Detroit), and Butler (2010 in Indianapolis) lost in the final.

In 1960, Cal had nearly as large an edge as Louisville had the previous year, only having to cross the San Francisco Bay to play in the Final Four at the Cow Palace in Daly City; the Golden Bears lost in the championship game to Ohio State.

During that era, three New York City teams, all from Manhattan, played in the east regional at Madison Square Garden—frequently used as a "big-game" venue by each team—and advanced at least to the national semifinals.

Similarly, in 2005, Illinois played in St. Louis, Missouri, where it enjoyed a noticeable home court advantage, yet still lost in the championship game to North Carolina.

One of the largest was done by a partnership between Quicken Loans and Berkshire Hathaway, which was backed by Warren Buffett, with a $1 billion prize to any person(s) who could correctly predict the outcome of the 2014 tournament.

Unlike the situation with March Madness, the KHSAA has retained sole ownership of the "Sweet Sixteen" trademark; it licenses the term to the NCAA for use in collegiate tournaments.

But the NCAA, which has a trademark on the term, says Final Four was originated by a Plain Dealer sportswriter, Ed Chay, in a 1975 article that appeared in the Official Collegiate Basketball Guide.

The term first came into widespread usage in 1950, when the City College of New York unexpectedly won the tournament in the same month that a film adaptation of "Cinderella" was released in the United States.