The calendar rolls around to March, and only one word can describe the sports world: madness.

All due respect to every other sport, but there is no other event that captivates the public the way March Madness does. It’s a single elimination tournament in a sport that has the most parity of any other major American sport. All the talk for the next few weeks will be on how your bracket is doing (even if it’s busted by day two) or what team is going to make a run.

Everyone loves making brackets. Many of us choose to make quite a few. Further proving just how popular the tournament is, even outside the sports world, Warren Buffet has offered one billion dollars to anyone that can make a perfect tournament bracket.

Around six million brackets are made every year just on ESPN.com. That doesn’t even scratch the surface considering all of the home brackets, office pools and other sites that host their own bracket tournaments.

Why is March Madness so popular? Well, that’s pretty simple. Considering 68 teams make the Big Dance, almost everyone has somebody to root for. Even if a person doesn’t have a particular favorite, everyone loves an underdog, and every year there is one that makes a run.

What makes the NCAA College Basketball Tournament so special is that anybody can be successful. While the lowest seed to ever win the entire tournament is the 1985 Villanova team, it seems like every year an unknown team makes a run. Recently teams like VCU, Butler and Wichita State have all made a big splash in the tournament.

March Madness has given America so many special memories throughout the years. Who can forget Christian Laettner’s buzzer-beater over Kentucky, Chris Webber’s timeout or the late Jim Valvano’s N.C. State team that defeated a Houston team that included future NBA legends Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon?

College basketball may not be the most popular sport in America. It’s probably not even the most popular collegiate sport.

However, for a few weeks in March, the rest of the sports world can do nothing else but make a bracket, put on their team colors and watch the madness unfold.