2008 NCAA Tournament Betting Preview

The NCAA Men's Basketball Championship is popularly known as March Madness, a time in the USA when basketball betting mainly in the form of office pools based on bracket picks is all the rage. 65 college basketball schools qualify for the 2008 tournament, with 33 teams receiving at-large bids. Thirty one of these schools will get in by winning their respective conference tournaments, so their identities will only be known at the end of the regular season.

We are highly confident that our March Madness Power Rankings provide you with 10 automatic bracket picks. The basketball handicapping experts feel that these ten schools are likely Sweet Sixteen candidates (although seeding clashes might of course prevent that from happening). The college basketball teams we have selected range from the perennial contenders for Final FOur berths such as Duke and North Carolina, to schools like Kansas and Memphis that are proving to be very tough to beat ATS in 2008, and finally we've added some longshot dark horses like Butler that could be this year's Cinderella team (like George Mason a couple of years ago).

The NCAA Tournament for 2008 will be the 69th Big Dance as the original tourney was first played in 1939, although back then it only consisted of eight teams, and it stayed that way until 1950. The term March Madness came into being in 1982, and as a reference to the tournament it is generally thought to have been coined by Brent Musburger.

March Madness mainly refers to the sports gambling frenzy that used to center around the Las Vegas sportsbooks but is now accessible from your home computer. Online sportsbooks provide NCAA Tournament odds for every game and as the bracket is winnowed down to the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four stages the betting levels increase substantially.

We'll feature free NCAA Tournament analysis, which will help everyone from the amateur looking for March Madness bracket picks to the high rollers who want to put down five dimes or more on each and every game! Sports betting can be extremely profitable and it is also an adrenaline rush second to none, especially when it comes to 2008 NCAA Tournament bets.