SUPER BOWL & FINAL FOUR HOTEL ROOMS

The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship is held each spring featuring 65
college basketball teams in the United States.

The 20-day tournament, colloquially known as "March Madness" or the Big Dance, has
become one of the United States' most prominent sports events.

One of the most difficult things for fans of the Final Four is to get hotel rooms during the
weekend. Hotel rooms downtown are usually the scarcest of them all. The NCAA usually
has control of most if not all of the hotel rooms during the final four weekend.

The tournament, whose field includes regional conference champions and other top teams,
is staged in a single elimination format. Since its 1939 inception, it has built a legacy that
includes dynasty teams and dramatic underdog stories. In recent years, friendly wagering
on the event has become something of a national pastime, spawning countless "office
pools" that attract expert fans and novices alike. All games of the tournament are broadcast
on the CBS broadcast television network in the United States.

The tournament bracket is made up of champions from each Division I conference, which
receive automatic bids. The remaining slots are at-large berths, with teams chosen by an
NCAA selection committee. The selection process and tournament seedings are based on
several factors, including team rankings, win-loss records and RPI data.

The two lowest-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning
their conference tournament championships) play a pre-tournament game to determine
which will advance into the first round of the tournament, with the winner advancing to play
the top seed in one of the four regions. This play-in game was added in 2001 and has been
played in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year.

A Most Outstanding Player honor is awarded by the Associated Press at the end of each
tournament.

A total of 65 teams qualify for the tournament played in March and April. Thirty of the teams
earn automatic bids by winning their respective conference tournaments. Because the Ivy
League does not conduct a postseason tournament, the regular-season conference
champion receives an automatic bid. The remaining teams are granted "at-large" bids,
which are extended by the NCAA Selection Committee.

The tournament is split into four regions and each region has teams seeded 1-16, with the
committee making every region as comparable to the others as possible. The best team in
each region plays the #16 team, the #2 team plays the #15, and so on.

Two teams play a play-in game game on the Tuesday preceding the first weekend of the
tournament, with the winner of that game advancing to the main draw of the tournament and
plays a top seed in one of the regionals. This game has been played at the University of
Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio since its inception in 2001. These two teams share equally in
the share of funds as if they had qualified for a first round game, and wins in the opening
round game are considered wins in the NCAA tournament. Thus, properly, the tournament
has 65 teams, although in practice most brackets only include the 63 teams, with one spot
blank (to be filled in after the play-in game). Since no #16 seed has ever beaten a #1 seed
in the men's championship, the result of the opening round game is largely deemed
irrelevant for bracket-filling purposes.

Since 2002, the tournament has used the so-called "pod" system, in which the eight first-
and second-round sites are distributed around the four regionals. Before the 2002
tournament, all teams playing at a first- or second-round site fed into the same regional
tournament. The pod system was designed to limit the early-round travel of as many teams
as possible.

In the pod system, each regional bracket is divided into four-team "pods". The possible
pods by seeding are:

Pod #1: 1v16, 8v9
Pod #2: 2v15, 7v10
Pod #3: 3v14, 6v11
Pod #4: 4v13, 5v12
Each of the eight first- and second-round sites is assigned two pods, where each group of
four teams play each other. A host site's pods may be from different regions, and thus the
winners of each pod would advance into separate regional tournaments.

The first- and second-round games are played on the first weekend of the tournament,
either on Thursday and Saturday or Friday and Sunday. The teams which are still alive after
the first weekend advance to the regional semi-finals (the Sweet Sixteen) and finals (the
Elite Eight) played on the second weekend of the tournament (again, the games are split
into Thursday/Saturday and Friday/Sunday).

The winners of each region advance to the Final Four, where the national semifinals are
played on Saturday and the national championship is played on Monday. Before the 2004
tournament, the pairings for the semifinals were based on an annual rotation. Since 2004,
the pairings are determined by the ranking of the four top seeds against each other.

The brackets are not reseeded after each round. The tournament is single-elimination and
there are no consolation games—although there was a third-place game as late as 1981,
and each regional had a third-place game through the 1975 tournament. The single-
elimination format produces opportunities for Cinderella teams to advance despite playing
much tougher teams. Meanwhile, despite the numerous instances of early-round
Tournament upsets, including four instances of a #15 Seed defeating a #2 Seed, no #1
seed has ever lost in the first round to a #16 seed. The closest call came in 1989 when
Georgetown University defeated Princeton University 60-59 and when University of
Oklahoma beat East Tennessee State 72-71.

March Madness
Disambiguation: "March Madness comes from the phrase 'Mad as a March Hare'. In
England, the phrase March Madness may refer to wasteful spending at the end of a budget
year. The rest of this article covers the use of the term in reference to the NCAA basketball
tournament, also known as the Road to the Final Four.

March Madness is a popular term for season-ending basketball tournaments played in
March (Brent Musburger is generally regarded as the individual who first used that phrase in
conjunction with the college tournament, using it during CBS Sports' coverage of the tourney
back in 1982 - see below), especially those conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) and various state high school associations. Supposedly, the phrase
was not associated with the college tournament when it first originated in 1939, when an
Illinois sportswriter wrote "A little March Madness [may] contribute to sanity." March Madness
is also a registered trademark, held jointly by the NCAA and the Illinois High School
Association. The trademark has sparked a pair of high-profile courtroom battles in recent
years.

March Madness or Big Dance refers to the frenzy these tournaments ignite among sports
fans and, at least at the college level, sports gamblers. As it applies to college basketball,
the term originally referred to the conference basketball tournaments, which occur in March
just before the NCAA tournament begins, but in recent years has been used to refer to the
NCAA tournament itself (the first weekend of which involves some 49 games, and which
actually runs into early April). The term is now used in reference to both the men's and
women's tournaments.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)® has neither licensed nor endorsed
ChampionshipRooms.com to sell goods and/or services in conjunction with NCAA
Championships.