NCAA Tournament: March Madness Is the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

March is a month full of reasons for celebration. Better weather is on the way, Mardi Gras is upon us and America is about to be consumed by a fever of college basketball known as March Madness.

No other annual sporting event has as much hype and anticipation as the road to the Final Four and NCAA Tournament.

While the Super Bowl is by far and away the biggest sporting event in North America, when's the last time you saw someone fill out a playoff bracket for the NFL, let alone any other sport?

This year the tournament will expand to 68 teams (thankfully not to the proposed 96). While bigger doesn't always mean better, the biggest change will come in the TV scheduling of the games.

No longer will fans be stuck with CBS coverage of blowouts between a No. 1 seed and a No. 16 seed. Now CBS, along with the Turner Networks, will broadcast the games across four networks with starting times spaced out by a half hour.

Some fans will miss the opportunity to watch four different games simultaneously, but who wants to go back to waiting for CBS to switch their coverage to that potential bracket buster? Goodbye to a halt in the action in favor of affiliate programming and local news; hello to 12-straight hours of hoops mania!

Each year millions of Americans fill out their bracket—or in some cases, many brackets. The great thing about filling out a bracket is the anticipation and expectation of parody. No other sporting event consumes the minds of fans in more in the selection and scrutinizing of upsets.

Fans will spend the better part of the three days leading up to the tournament after Selection Sunday debating which upsets they should choose. A No. 1 seed vs. No. 8 seed matchup in the NBA or NHL playoffs doesn't demand the scrutiny that a No. 5 seed vs. No. 12 seed or a No. 6 seed vs. No. 11 seed matchup gets in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

Only once since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 have all four No. 1 seeds made it to the Final Four. Fans expect the best teams to lose early in the tournament and try to predict which powerhouse teams will fail in their quest for the title.

Who cares about the method of madness for your upset predictions? All that matters is you picked Northern Iowa over Kansas in 2010 and half the people in the tournament pool just had their brackets thrashed.

This is the one sporting event where the novice often makes more correct predictions than the expert. Doesn't it feel great when you have a better bracket than someone like Andy Katz or Joe Lunardi?

Cinderella teams have always screwed up brackets and sometimes win championships on and off the court. Every college basketball fan who has ever done a tournament pool has had a time when they filled out a bracket that was in ruins a week later, while someone else who filled out a bracket for the first time is leading the pool.

Whether you're a casual fan of college basketball or a cable sports network analyst, nobody picks a perfect bracket. The chances of correctly predicting the first two rounds are one in 13,460,000. The odds rise to one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 for correctly predicting the winner of all 63 games (not including the first four in this number).

The MLB playoffs and UEFA Champions League are two popular sporting events where games are often played during the school and work hours for most people in North America. While both have their respective audience of devoted fans, more Americans will switch up their schedules to tune into the NCAA tournament.

Best of all, the first round starts on St. Patrick's Day this year, giving you another reason to rejoice on March 17th. Many will call in "sick" for work or school, or just leave early—or skip it all together. Whether sitting at home in the man cave or at a crowded local sports bar, there is nothing else to describe this feeling or time of year other than March Madness.