March Madness Tickets

 
The Super Bowl has long been considered as the Holy Grail of American Sports. However, of late another sporting phenomenon has started giving the Super Bowl a run for its money. "That's crazy" or "What madness" you'd think right? Well you may never have been more right than wrong in your life. Each year, the March Madness season grips the nation in a sporting frenzy, what with it entailing not one, or even two, but three NCAA Division I sports. What originally started as the clash of only the men's and women's basketball teams has grown to include hockey and wrestling encounters as well. The appetite of this sport-fueled ogre has increased to monstrous proportions and can only be appeased through hordes of fans paying their tribute to NCAA March Madness 2013.
 
March Madness is more than seven decades in the making. It all started back in 1939 in Oregon when the basketball teams of the University of Oregon and Ohio State went head-to-head in the NCAA Division I championship game, with the former emerging as the first champions in a 46-33 outcome. March Madness was unleashed on collegiate sports fans by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, with Harold Olsen, the coach from Ohio State being the progenitor of the concept. However, the whole business of March Madness and celebrating it in with full sporting fury began in 1984 when the Seattle Organizing Committee's Bob Walsh formalized the entire affair. It has also come to be known as the Big Dance, with the NCAA basketball 2013 tournament being no exception.  
 
Over the decades, the number of basketball teams participating in the March Madness event has grown from an initial eight to a whopping sixty-eight. Following the 2010 event, it was even considered that the pool of teams should be nearly doubled to 128 and it was then officially announced on April 1^st that the 2011 chapter of March Madness would be featuring 96 teams up from the previous number of 65. However, just three weeks later it was revealed in the CNS/Turner television contract that only three more teams would be added, bringing the total number to 68. The NCAA basketball March Madness 2013 happening, though not seeing an increase in the number of participating teams will nonetheless be chockablock full of all the right kind of craziness building up to a dizzying crescendo to the penultimate Final Four stage and the Big Championship Game itself. What can be perceived as an April fool's day prank is just the tip of the iceberg of the significance of numbers in this collegiate level sporting event.
 
The NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Championship has been played since 1948 and currently features 16 teams that come from all the five conferences of the association's Division I. With the teams coming out on top in each respective conference receiving an automatic bid to the NCAA Championship, the rest of the spots are up for grabs each time around. The semifinal games are collectively known as the Frozen Four, taking a cue from the NCAA Division I Basketball's Final Four. Michigan State leads the rankings with 9 wins, followed closely by both Denver and North Dakota at 7. The NCAA Wrestling Team Championship trooped on the scene back in 1929 and the current March Madness Wrestling Tournament milieu is dominated by Oklahoma State that has clinched 34 titles, with Iowa and Iowa State coming in a distant second and third at 23 and 8 respectively.
 
March Madness has become huge business for all the concerned parties; from the organizing committee to the operators of the arenas, the broadcasting networks and other stakeholders all vying for chunks of the billion dollar pie. The bakers of this pie, besides the tens of thousands of live spectators and the 140 million plus television audience, are the consumer companies that pour in hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue. These range from automakers, beverage companies, airlines, energy drinks manufacturers and the makers of sports apparel. However, the spates of adverts that are bombarded during the televised games are conspicuously different from those making the rounds during the Super Bowl telecast, mainly due to the absence of beer ads. This is typically due to the fact that most of the fans are college-going and hence under the legal drinking age limit. However, this hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of the young bloods and the NCAA March Madness 2013 spectacle will have them partying like there is no tomorrow.