NCAA March Madness Tournament

1145 Words3 Pages

One of the top sporting events in the world is considered to be the NCAA March Madness tournament. This tournament is ranked third just behind the super bowl and FIFA World Cup. It’s unbelievable to think that one of the top sporting events in the world is in college athletics. You have other professional sports like basketball, baseball, hockey and NASCAR, but there championships still don’t compare to the NCAA championship. March madness is so popular that global firms Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc believe that companies are expected to lose about $1.2 billion because of every hour of work that employees are watching games instead of working (Koba, 2014). These employees will spend on average 90 minutes a day at work watching basketball instead of doing their job. With over 50 million Americans competing in some type of March madness pool, this doesn’t seem out of the question. This just shows how popular of an event this tournament is. Some people even believe that this tournament costs business so much money that it’s actually toxic for the US economy.
March Madness coined its name in 1908 by a man named Henry V. Porter. Mr. Porter was the secretary at the Illinois High School Association. He wrote an article that was called “March Madness” and they took this saying into the invitational where fans could use it for the basketball games during March (Latrel, 2013). However, this March madness that Henry Porter created didn’t start with college athletics. It started as a small high school invitational tournament in Illinois. The Illinois High School Association sponsored this March madness event where local boys high school teams would compete at the University of Illinois arena. This is a large arena that would get filled...

... middle of paper ...

...of revenue, which is great for the small programs that are involved. With the CBS contact being $11 billion dollars, these teams can get a large sum of money. I think that this March madness tournament has nothing, but good to come from it.

Works Cited

AskMen. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Mar. 2014. .

NBC News. N.p., 17 Mar. 2014. Web. 8 Mar. 2014. http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/your-march-madness-pool-probably-illegal-n54521

1-800 Sports. N.p., 11 Mar. 2013. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.
.

NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 18 March 2014. Web. 18 March 2014.

Open Document