March Madness

Watch this on YouTube here - March Video - YouTube Video

Meaning:

March Madness refers to the college basketball tournament that is held in March and lasts till the beginning of April.

“It’s March Madness, baby.”

Origin:

The history of march madness is a little older than the college basketball tournament. This saying started out a bit different, and not only has it changed its name over time but also it's meaning.

March madness was a term used since the early 1900s to refer to “a form of madness or uncharacteristic behavior said to affect people in March.” This expression started due to the crazy spring fever people would get, you know, the feeling of you just want to get out of the house after a long cold winter, but you just can’t yet. That is march madness.

Even before we started to refer to people as having “march madness,” it has been said that it started due to the way hares would act in March. The saying might have started out “as mad as a March hare” due to the occurrence of hares becoming very aggressive during the breeding season in March. It was then shortened to march madness later on.

Lewis Carroll takes a twist to the use of the bunny cliché with his characters, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare; both of them appear in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Today we have changed the meaning of March Madness to refer to the NCAA basketball tournament that starts in March; this started back in 1939 when the high school athletics administrator and sportswriter Henry Porter used the phrase in an article. March Madness was then used for the Illinois state basketball tournaments before spreading to the Midwest region. In 1980 March Madness was then used by the NCAA.

Example:

This is now used to express the particularly wild and exciting games that can include some buzzer-beating, bracket-busting upsets. An Example sentence is:

“I can’t wait to watch the march madness games with my friends.”

Watch this on YouTube here - March Video - YouTube Video

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