Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The NCAA Tournament has existed for decades before gaining its iconic nickname.
- A journalist's late-night broadcast comment during a chaotic game night popularized the phrase.
- The term's widespread adoption transformed how fans describe the tournament's unpredictable nature.
The men's and women's NCAA Tournaments are set to begin in a matter of days, which means the return of one of the best phrases in all of sports: March Madness. Two words that have become so ubiquitous, they almost transcend college basketball itself. They just sound like they belong together — as though the tourney couldn't possibly exist without them.
But of course, that's not exactly true. In fact, the NCAA Tournament existed for about half a century before March Madness entered the national lexicon. And if it weren't for a journalist's stroke of genius and a little late-night luck, we might all be calling it something else still today.
Why is the NCAA Tournament called March Madness? Thank Brent Musburger
We have to go all the way back to 1939, ironically enough the same year the first men's NCAA Tournament was held. But our story doesn't begin with college basketball; it begins in the high school ranks, and an Illinois writer named Henry V. Porter.
A former high school coach himself, Porter was at the time working as an assistant executive secretary for the Illinois High School Athletic Association. In anticipation of the state's basketball tournament, he wrote an essay for Illinois High School Athlete magazine in which he argued that "a little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel". Three years later, he even wrote a poem, "Basketball Ides of March", that featured the phrase "madness of March" multiple times.
Whether Porter is the one who actually coined the phrase is still a matter of debate; etymologist Barry Popik has argued that similar language was used to describe Indiana's high school basketball tournament years prior. But whoever gets the original credit, March Madness still lay dormant for several decades, until a certain Northwestern alum helped take it national.
It was awesome to talk #MarchMadness with the legend @brentmusburger today and he told Suzy Shuster if he really came up with the legendary phrase:#NCAATournament pic.twitter.com/AmlthWVBlv
— Rich Eisen Show (@RichEisenShow) March 17, 2023
Flash forward to 1982. The Big Dance has become pretty big business, and former Chicago American reporter Brent Musburger is now serving as studio host for the tournament on CBS. After a particularly upset-filled night of basketball, history was made.
“I had a board where I physically put names of the teams up,” Musburger told Suzy Shuster of the Rich Eisen Show back in 2023. “And it was late one Thursday evening after the opening games, we had a couple of big upsets that night late out of the West Coast and I said, ‘folks, this is madness, this is March Madness!’"
Musburger, to his credit, didn't try to claim the phrase as his own.
“I didn’t just pull it out of thin air," he recalled. "But when I was a newspaper man and a broadcaster back in Chicago ... there was a car dealer who was always close to the state high school basketball tournament in the state of Illinois ... and he referred to it in an ad that ran in our paper as March Madness. And that stuck with me when I went to the network.”
It stuck with the rest of the country, too. Slowly but surely, March Madness caught on, the perfect, alliterative encapsulation of the chaos that is the NCAA Tournament. It eventually became so popular that the NCAA tried to trademark it. There was just one problem: The IHSAA had already done so back in 1989, and wasn't afraid to sue to prevent other parties from using it. Eventually, the two sides were able to reach a settlement, allowing the NCAA to use the term in reference to college basketball while the state of Illinois gets to use to in reference to high school. Even the legal system gives us Cinderellas this time of year.