What the NCAA Tournament has in store for us this year

When you hear the name of a country you can immediately associate it with something, you hear England you think Big Ben, you hear Germany you think Beer and you can associate a lot of things to the USA. Food, landmarks, people but one of the biggest stereotypes is sports. American football and basketball are amongst the most popular ones.

Every year when spring comes around the NCAA's Division one has this tournament where the best of it's member colleges take part and play against each other. Because it's a single elimination tournament at the end you get the best college team in the United States. This might not sound like much at first but it's an extremely important part of American culture. At one point in time college sports, basketball especially was considered to be more pure than professional sports and many fans believed that the professional teams are just in for the money and that college basketball remains true to the game. This is how college basketball became so popular and why people each year fill out brackets and probably will be filling out a 2012 NCAA Tournament bracket as well.

Just to show you how much of an impact this tournament has on American society, after people get the 2012 NCAA Tournament Schedule it is estimated, because it happens each year or at least that's the myth that business each year lose 1.7 billion dollars or more because of March Madness and the productivity drop that results from it. There are many reasons why this is just a myth and not correct but this isn't the place to talk about that. The point is college basketball remains and becomes more popular with each passing year and it was and remains a very important part of American culture.

About the MVC Tournament

In the United States higher education has one thing, while it isn't unique and other colleges around the world have it too in the form and organization that it has its unique. Generally it's called college athletic conference and there are many of them in the US. Basically these came to be during the early days of American football, because the game used to be so rough and there were many injuries, even deaths in some cases it was decided that athletic conferences should be formed that would impose rules on how the games can be played so that injuries and things like cheating would be prevented.

One of these conferences that still exist to this day is the MCV or in its full name the Missouri Valley Conference. As you might guess by its name it is made up from colleges in the Midwest US and it's also part of the NCAA's Division I. The conference itself dates back to 1907 and back then it was known as the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association or shortened MVIAA and to this day it is the second oldest Division I college conference in the United States. While a lot of people are excited about the 2012 MVC Tournament Bracket most people don't know that the larger schools from the MVIAA or at least most of them would later on form the Big Eight Conference and the smaller schools together formed the MCV.

Another interesting fact is that the MCV hasn't sponsored football since 1985 which is quite rare for a conference of its size these days but there are still some members that do have football programs within its ranks. One should also not confuse the Missouri Valley Conference with the Missouri Valley Football Conference because while they do share a similar name and even share their headquarters they aren't the same conference.