This year, Princess Anne students and staff will again have an opportunity to submit March Madness brackets for a school-wide predictions tournament. The Page will be hosting a bracket challenge for the 2025 NCAA Division One Men’s Basketball Championships, which are usually known as March Madness. The tournament will take place from March 18 to April 7, and feature 68 colleges across America competing for the national championship.
For much of the United States, as well as in Hampton Roads, a common tradition is to attempt to pick the winners of each March Madness game, and predict who will be the eventual winner. At first, smaller schools face seemingly insurmountable odds against national powerhouses, but as the tournament goes on, upsets happen and brackets can be ruined. In 2018, many had #1 overall seed UVA taking the title, but in a common example of the “madness” of March, they were defeated in the first round by underdog UMBC.
Those in the PA community will have an opportunity to compete against fellow students or staff members, with one pool for the student body and one pool for the staff. Pool leaderboards on The Page site will be updated during the course of the tournament, and winners will be featured on The Page with their bracket.
The 2025 bracket will be released on Selection Sunday, March 16. That night, you can begin making your picks. More information about how to fill out a bracket can be found here.
Challenge Rules
Brackets will be scored under the traditional 1-2-4-8-16-32 format, where points won for each individual game increases across the tournament and the number of teams in a round multiplied by the number of points per correct pick always equals 64. Therefore, picking the champion and Final Four teams correctly is usually going to constitute a highly successful bracket. The maximum number of points that could be won is 192 in this system, but that would require a correct pick for every single game, and no recorded March Madness bracket has ever been perfect. In fact, the NCAA puts the odds of a relatively-researched bracket being perfect at one in 120.2 Billion.
College names written down should be readable and at least closely resembling the team you think will win so that it is clear who you picked. Abbreviations for schools names like “Nova” for Villanova and “Bama” for Alabama are totally acceptable, as are acronyms like ODU and VCU.
Should a tie occur between first place competitors in either of the pools, the tiebreaker will fall to the entry with the correct national champion pick. Further tiebreakers, if needed, will be the most correct teams in the championship game, Final Four, Elite Eight, and Sweet Sixteen.
While the opening days of the tournament will be March 18 and March 19, the games on these dates are part of the First Four and will not count for any points in the bracket challenge. First Four matchups in the brackets (under “first round” or “round of 64”) will be displayed as Team One/Team Two, and will be counted as one team. Therefore, if Xavier/Oklahoma is a First Four matchup and you would like to pick one of them to win their first round game, you may put down “Xavier”, “Oklahoma”, or “Xavier/Oklahoma” and all of these would be valid answers should one of either team win in the first round. This is so that brackets turned in after the First Four games, but still before the March 20 challenge deadline, do not have the advantage of knowing which team will be competing in the first round.
Physical bracket papers will be available in a basket outside room 210 starting on March 18. They must be returned to room 210 before 12 p.m. on March 20, which is when the tournament starts. You can also print out a bracket yourself and turn it in, which may be necessary given a limited number of brackets available outside room 210. Please put down your name and either student or staff to be entered in the competition.
