Butler's Andrew Smith and Connecticut's Alex Oriakhi battle for the opening tip at the 2011 NCAA Championship game on April 4, 2011.
17 March 2023
March Madness is the originally popular, later trademarked, name for the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship tournament held each year in that month. But the phrase did not originate with the NCAA, or even with basketball for that matter.
The original sense of march madness was quite literal, referring to someone’s unusual or wild behavior in the month of March. Presumably the onset of spring was thought to alter one’s mental state. We see this literal sense in an article published in London’s European Magazine in May 1825:
It has been exceedingly well observed, that true politeness consists in ease, to which good sense is a happy auxiliary. Form and false parade stick close to the ignorant and the vulgar.
Should we not think it a very March madness to stickle for precedency, when a matter of consequence demanded that we waste not a single moment? And yet Mistress Snooks, from the city, will stand bobbing and curtseying to her neighbour, Madam Higginson, and exclaim—“La, no, madam—indeed, ma’am—’pon my honour, I can’t go first”—and all about—the rain coming down by bucket-fulls the while—who should first ascend the steps and ensconce themselves on the leathern seats of a dirty hackney-coach.
Around one hundred years later in the United States, the phrase made the leap to basketball. March marks the end of the basketball season, and in Indiana, the various high-school championship tournaments started to be referred to as March madness. The earliest example I know of is from the Rushville Republican of 11 March 1931, which connects the earlier, literal sense with the fever of a sports fan:
March Madness
The elimination of Anderson Tech, Columbus and Shelbyville were only mere flurries of what is to follow this week at the various basketball conventions in sixteen regional cities.—Newcastle Courier-Times.
Bob Stranahan evidently became afflicted with some of his own March madness, for Columbus was not eliminated, as Shelbyville can likely tell you.
Keep thinking about Lawrenceburg until supper time Saturday evening. Then if everything turns out right, BEAR DOWN ON THE SPARTANS.
Other references to various tournaments quickly appear in other Indiana papers, and over the next few decades March madness becomes a sportswriter’s term of art for any championship basketball tournament.
The earliest reference I’ve found to the NCAA championship is in the New York Daily News of 11 March 1958:
The annual March madness tips off tonight at the Garden with a tripleheader, involving four conference champions and two at-large selections, in the first round of the Eastern NCAA regionals.
The NCAA trademarked March Madness in 1989.
Sources:
“The Basketeer.” Rushville Republican (Indiana), 11 March 1931, 2/2. Newspaper Archive.com
“Crooked Customs.” European Magazine, May 1825, 413/1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
O’Day, Joe. “W.Va. Tests Jaspers in NCAA Tilt Tonight.” Daily News (New York), 11 March 1958, 25C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2000, s.v. March, n.2.
US Patent and Trademark Office. Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS), accessed 17 March 2023.
Photo credit: Texan Photography, 2011. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.