2009 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament

The 2009 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament will involve 65 schools playing in a single-elimination tournament to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball as a culmination of the 2008–09 basketball season. Held every spring it is scheduled to begin on March 17, 2009, and will conclude with the championship game on April 6 at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan, which will mark the first time a Final Four will have a minimum seating capacity of 70,000.
A total of 65 teams will enter the tournament. Thirty of the teams will earn automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments. The automatic bid of the Ivy League, which does not conduct a postseason tournament, will go to its regular-season champion. The remaining 34 teams will be granted "at-large" bids, which are extended by the NCAA Selection Committee.
Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) compete in the "opening round" 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. The opening Round game was added in 2001 and has been played in University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year. Even though the opening round is technically considered part of the tournament, it is often referred to as a "play-in" game.
All 64 teams will be seeded 1 to 16 within their region; the winner of the play-in game automatically will receive a 16 seed. The Selection Committee, appointed by the NCAA, will seed the entire field from 1 to 65. There are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion) possibilities for a 64 team NCAA bracket.[4]
This tournament, organized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), was first developed by the National Association of Basketball Coaches in 1939. The NCAA would take over the tournament the following season. Colloquially known as March Madness (as the tournament takes place mainly during the month of March) or the Big Dance (as opposed to the now smaller and less prestigious NIT), the tournament takes place over three weeks at sites across the United States, and the national semifinals (the Final Four) have become one of the nation's most prominent sporting events.
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. The tournament bracket is made up of conference tournament 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 seeds are based on several factors, including team rankings, win-loss records and RPI data.
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. The effect of this seeding structure ensures that the better a team is seeded, the worse-seeded their opponents will be.
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 higher seeded teams. Nonetheless, 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.

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