March Madness perfectly captures the frenzy of the NCAA Tournament, but its origins lie far from the bright lights of college basketball’s biggest stage.

The name actually captures exactly what unfolds during the tournament. It perfectly describes the chaos, the upsets, the buzzer-beaters, and the sheer unpredictability of a single-elimination tournament where any team, on any given night, can send a nation into a frenzy. 

But where did the name “March Madness” actually come from? Because it fits so perfectly that it is almost hard to believe it was not invented for this tournament at all.

What Does “March Madness” Mean in College Basketball?

The name “March Madness” refers to the NCAA college basketball tournament, a single-elimination competition held every March that determines the national champion in both men’s and women’s college basketball. The tournament begins with 68 teams selected from various conferences and divisions across the country. 

This selection is determined by a combination of automatic bids won in conference tournaments and at-large berths awarded by the NCAA selection committee to the most deserving programs that fell short of a conference title. It is one of the most-watched and most discussed sporting events in the United States every single year.

The ‘one-and-done’ structure creates an environment where unpredictable upsets are frequent, and you see lower-seeded ‘Cinderella’ teams disrupting the bracket by outplaying a powerhouse for just 40 minutes. That is the madness.

Who First Coined the Term “March Madness”?

The phrase “March Madness” did not actually start in a college basketball arena or a network television studio. Its first notable mention was in a magazine article written by Henry V. Porter about high school basketball in Illinois. 

Porter was the assistant executive secretary of the Illinois High School Association in the late 1930s. At the time, the state’s high school basketball tournament had grown into one of the most popular sporting events in the region. What started as a small invitational in 1908 had expanded to include more than 900 schools by the 1930s, and it was regularly drawing sellout crowds to the University of Illinois’s Huff Gymnasium. The atmosphere was also very electric, with entire communities rallying behind their local teams. That created an intensity that Porter then described as “madness”.

Specifically, Porter wrote the said article in March 1939, and it was published in the Illinois Interscholastic, the Association’s in-house magazine. “A little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel,” he wrote. Three years later, he followed up with a poem titled “Basketball Ides of March,” which read in part: “A sharp-shooting mite is king tonight. The Madness of March is running.” 

The term caught on immediately within Illinois, and local newspapermen used it throughout the 1940s and 1950s to describe the state tournament. It became so synonymous with the event that the IHSA also officially began using it in its programs and merchandise in 1973. 

How Did the NCAA Tournament Adopt the Name “March Madness”?

“It’s madness, folks. This is March Madness.” Brent Musberger said that during an NCAA Tournament broadcast in 1982. He was describing an upset. That was the first time someone used the phrase “March Madness” in connection with the NCAA Tournament.

Musberger had begun his career as a sportswriter in Chicago, where he became familiar with the phrase through its association with the Illinois state high school tournament. When CBS took over broadcasting rights for the NCAA Tournament in 1982, and Musberger became the network’s host for the event, the phrase stayed with him. 

“When we’d have an upset, I’d say, ‘It’s madness, folks. This is March Madness,” Musberger recalled in a 2019 interview. “That’s how it came to be. I started to use it, and it just kind of stuck.” And stick it did. With CBS’s national reach, the phrase traveled from living room to living room across America, landing in the consciousness of millions of fans who had never heard of the Illinois state tournament.

And the timing was perfect. While the tournament had 48 teams in 1982, it expanded to a 64-team field in 1985, which ushered in the ‘modern era’ of the tournament. This expansion meant more games, more upsets, and more of the unpredictable chaos that the word ‘madness’ was built to describe. By the time the 1980s ended, the term ‘March Madness’ and the NCAA Tournament were effectively inseparable in the public imagination.

When Did “March Madness” Become an Official NCAA Trademark?

With the term’s popularity, the NCAA began licensing “March Madness” in 1988, effectively treating it as its own despite its Illinois origins. The Illinois High School Association, meanwhile, attempted to register it in 1989, only to discover that a Chicago-based businessman, Charles Besser, owner of Intersport, had already registered it. Intersport then assigned its licensing rights to the IHSA in 1995 in exchange for a perpetual license and a share of royalties, and that set the stage for a direct conflict between the IHSA and the NCAA.

That conflict arrived in 1996, when the IHSA sued an NCAA licensee for using the term on a CD-ROM game. The court, however, ruled that “March Madness” had become a “dual-use term,” meaning both organisations had legitimate claims to it. So rather than continue litigating, the two sides eventually formed the March Madness Athletic Association and shared the licensing rights. 

The NCAA held the rights at the college level, while the IHSA retained them at the high school level. The arrangement held for years, but Musberger’s own assessment during legal proceedings that the phrase truly belonged to Illinois ultimately accelerated a settlement where the NCAA paid $17.2 million to acquire the full trademark, a brand that now earns it roughly $1 billion annually.

Is “March Madness” Used Only for Men’s Basketball?

For much of its history, ‘March Madness’ primarily referred to the men’s NCAA Tournament. But that understanding has changed rapidly, and the phrase now officially applies to both the men’s and women’s tournaments.

The NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament runs simultaneously with the men’s event every March. And it has operated under the same “March Madness” branding umbrella for years. In fact, the scale of attention the women’s tournament commands, and the degree to which that attention rivals the men’s, has increased exponentially.

The emergence of players like Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, and Angel Reese really transformed the women’s tournament. Notably, the 2024 NCAA Women’s Championship game averaged 18.9 million viewers to become the first women’s title game in history to outdraw the men’s. That milestone made it clear ‘March Madness’ was no longer just a men’s term.

Today, when fans say “March Madness,” they are talking about both tournaments, and the women’s bracket has become as hotly discussed, as widely watched, and as bracket-bustingly chaotic as anything the men’s side has produced. The madness, as it turns out, has always belonged to everyone.