The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament, commonly referred to as March Madness, is a yearly college basketball tournament. This year, the Florida Gators won the National Championship for the fourth time in their program’s history, marking the end of the 2025 men’s college basketball season.
The historic tournament consists of 68 college programs across the country fighting to decide who will be crowned national champion. This tournament started the tradition of making March Madness brackets.
Many Loy Norrix students participate by making brackets and competing to accurately predict tournament outcomes. According to the NCAA an estimated 60-100 million people yearly participate in making brackets.
In order to increase one’s chances of winning, many participants make multiple brackets.
Sophomore Rashad Mitchell, who plays junior varsity basketball, typically makes two to three brackets.
“Some years when I do brackets, I’m pretty accurate, and some years I’m not,” said Mitchell.
The tournament is very unpredictable, so it’s not surprising to have some well-performing years, along with some poor-performing years, as Mitchell has found. He started making brackets in seventh grade and has a lot of experience watching March Madness.
“I had really good picks, and I predicted the actual championship winner,” said Mitchell, referring to the 2022 tournament when the Kansas Jayhawks won the national championship.
This year, however, Mitchell was less successful. He predicted the Duke Blue Devils to win this year’s championship, not the winning team, the Florida Gators.
Junior Samuel Gagie, a varsity basketball player, started making brackets in the first grade. Like Mitchell, he constructs multiple brackets to increase his chances of winning.
“This year I made around thirty [brackets], but, on average, around twenty a year, combined on phone and paper,” said Gagie.
Gagie’s passion for making brackets started as a simple family tradition.
“My family would have a bracket pool, and the best bracket by the end of the tournament would be rewarded with money,” said Gagie.
Like Mitchell, Gagie predicted that the Blue Devils would win.
“I think they are the most talented team, and I don’t see anyone stopping them,” said Gagie before the Gators’ win.
Gagie’s “Cinderella story” team prediction for the Clemson Tigers also didn’t go as planned. Often, fans hope that a typically low-performing team will rise to the occasion and make it far in the tournament. This phenomenon’s similarities with the classic fairytale have given it the moniker “Cinderella story.”
“I had Clemson and that didn’t work, they lost in the first round, and I had them going to the Final Four,” Gagie said.
Neither prediction worked out, as Duke lost in the Final Four and Clemson lost in the first round.
Other students, however, had more success with their brackets. This was sophomore Kaylen Robinson’s first year participating, and she accurately predicted that the UConn Huskies would win in 2024.
“I just thought it would be fun,” said Robinson. “I’d say my bracket was pretty good, and I guessed the winning team. I first picked UCLA, but changed my pick to UConn.”
Although the UConn Huskies were the 2024 National Champions, they lost this year in the second round. Throughout the tournament, Robinson and her friends liked the competitiveness between each other over who had the most accurate bracket.
“It was fun to see who would do better with their predictions throughout the tournament,” Robinson said.
Whether it was their first bracket or their thirtieth, students like Mitchell, Gagie, and Robinson were all caught up in the excitement of March Madness. The competition became a month-long experience that brought friends together and created lasting memories within the school community.
