Bracket buster

Bracket buster, as a generic phrase, refers to an American college basketball team, usually from a so-called mid-major school, which upsets a highly-ranked team in the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.

The tournament schedule is set up as a single-elimination "bracket" format. When the tournament's selection committee announces the teams that are invited to play and the schedule of the games, fans will try to guess the outcome of as many games as possible by filling out the bracket form for each round. This is often accompanied by gambling on the outcome of these predictions; this often takes the form of an informal pool where participants stake a certain amount of money, and the most successful predictor wins the pooled stakes. When a lightly-regarded mid-major team upsets a traditional powerhouse team, the result often knocks out subsequent predictions of many players in these informal pools, who are said to have had their brackets busted — hence, the term "bracket buster."

There are numerous examples of a bracket buster teams over the years of the NCAA Tournament, even dating back before the tournament came to be the widespread cultural event that it is today. One early example is the March 18, 1971 Mideast Regional game in which Western Kentucky University defeated its better-known in-state "big brother," the University of Kentucky, 107-83. The game was more significant to hoops fans in the Bluegrass State, as the Kentucky Wildcats and coach Adolph Rupp had steadfastly refused to play any other in-state schools (including the University of Louisville) in regular season games, so the game itself was very significant no matter the outcome. The Hilltoppers later advanced to the Final Four.

As the tournament field expanded to the now-familiar six-round bracket and 65 teams (including the play-in game), "bracket busters" became more of a phenomenon. The most recent example is George Mason University and its improbable run to the Final Four in the 2006 tournament. Bradley University was another example in the same tournament, having been assigned the 13th seed in their region, only to upset the University of Kansas and the University of Pittsburgh to reach the "Sweet 16" round, where the Braves were finally ousted by top-seeded University of Memphis.

ESPN Bracket Busters

As the phrase became more popular, ESPN decided to capitalize on the phenomenon with the concept of ESPN Bracket Busters. The cable television network worked with a group of mid-major conferences, including the Missouri Valley Conference, the Western Athletic Conference and the Mid-American Conference to stage a series of games where possible bracket-buster teams would play each other outside of regular conference play. The idea was to give these mid-major schools more exposure to national audiences than they would otherwise get, and bost their chances of being selected for the NCAA Tournament.

The first series began in 2003, where 18 teams played in one weekend. The matchups for these games was left open a late as possible, in order to determine the most likely teams to benefit. The concept proved greatly successful, and in the 2006 edition of ESPN Bracket Busters — now with corporate sponsorship by eBay — featured 100 different teams. So many teams were involved that fewer than half the games were actually televised on the ESPN family of networks. The 2007 edition had O'Reilly Auto Parts as the title sponsor.

In 2006, two teams that faced each other in an ESPN Bracket Busters game — George Mason and Wichita State University — faced each other in the round of 16.