March Madness 2014

March Madness is here! The NCAA Men and Women Basketball Tournaments begin this week. The four preliminary men's games are on Tuesday, March 18, 2014, and Wednesday, March 19, 2014. The Men's Tournament begins on Thursday, March 20, 2014, and the Women's Tournament begins on Saturday, March 22, 2014! For Men's game times, etc: Men's Games For Women's game times, etc: Women's Games

FYI: For all of those BYU fans like me out there, BYU men landed a 10th seed in the West Region and will be playing Oregon (7th seed) on Thursday, March 20, 2014, at 1:10 PM on TruTV, and BYU women landed a 12th seed in the Lincoln Division and will be playing North Carolina State (5th seed) on Saturday, March 22, 2014, at 4:30 PM on ESPN2! They're games are highlighted yellow in the Men's and Women's brackets further down the post. My bold prediction for BYU (both teams) this tournament is that they will both win at least two games each.

In Microsoft Excel, I created my own brackets. Below is the main design of those brackets. The left one is the Men's, and the right one is the Women's. In the center of each is the championship game. The lines leading to the center from the four regions/divisions show where the winner of the game goes for the next game.

If y'all want an excel spreadsheet like mine, just comment on this post, email me, or contact me through Facebook or Twitter. You can also go the way of going to the links in the first paragraph of this post or go to www.espn.go.com and print off the brackets available at those links. To get a closer up look at my homemade brackets, scroll a little further down. You will find the Men's and the Women's brackets, respectively in order. I didn't post my picks, but if you want to see them, contact me through the same ways mentioned earlier in this paragraph. All I will say is that I'm guessing Arizona will win overall for Men's and Connecticut will win overall for Women's.

This is the Men's bracket I created. As you can see I have added a couple things of what I do with teams that win or teams I guess incorrectly. First of all, look at the Arizona (1st seed) vs. Weber State (16th seed) game on the top right corner. In theory, if Arizona was to win that game, I would color the Arizona word green. With the next two games underneath, say I guessed Oklahoma and New Mexico State (NM State) to win their games. What if San Diego State won instead of New Mexico State? I would then color my NM State guess red and cross it out (you can do through formatting cells). After that, I would put San Diego State and it's seed number underneath NM State. If Oklahoma didn't win, ND State would go above the Oklahoma guess. 

The four games at the top determine who will go in the four numbered slots on the side. For example, the winner of the #1 game (UA vs. MSMary) would play Florida (look at the top left corner). Those four games, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, will be played tomorrow and Wednesday night.

This is the Women's bracket.

If you want to see the games for the men's and women's NIT championships, go to these links: Men's NIT and Women's NIT (The Women's NIT teams will be announced tonight before midnight) In the men's NIT, teams like Utah and Utah Valley are going to play.