March brings a welcome respite from the chaos of the current political climate with its NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament. March Madness provides an opportunity to put stressful concerns on the back burner and delve into the mysteries of brackets, the aesthetics of breakaways and the heart-stopping unease of buzzer-beaters. But the NCAA tournament...

It’s a challenge to capture the excitement surrounding this year’s NCAA Division 1 women’s basketball tournament. In the first round, Iowa’s future WNBA star, Caitlin Clark, scored 27 points and had 10 assists to lead the Hawkeyes to victory over the Crusaders of Holy Cross. Not to be outdone, Kiki Iriafen led the Stanford Cardinals...

With all that’s going wrong around the world, and given the nation’s increasing disillusionment with higher education, it is a special treat for basketball fans to be able to turn their attention to March Madness. For us, it’s time to celebrate athletes and their schools by turning our attention to our alternative bracket to the...

For the last six years, I have drawn up a parallel bracket that plots the winners and losers in the NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament — aka March Madness — not by how the schools have done on the court, but by how well they have made upward mobility possible for their students. Now, for the first...

Once again, March Madness has taken hold of much of the nation as this month’s NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament gets off the ground. As we have done over the past six years, we take this opportunity, when the nation is focused on figuring out which colleges produce the best basketball teams, to examine...

For the hundreds of schools, thousands of students and millions of fans left dismayed by the cancellation last year of the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament, the return of March Madness is cause for much celebration and, of course, much caution. The Big Dance comes at a time when vaccinations are leading the nation...

Once again, March Madness builds to a crescendo this weekend, with the “Final Four” basketball bouts set to dominate the Saturday spotlight. For many sports fans, this is an excellent time to debate what it takes to be a winner on the court — but for those of us focused on the country’s schools and...