2022 NCAA bracket: Printable March Madness bracket .PDF

Here is the official and printable NCAA bracket for the 2021-22 NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, also known as March Madness. Baylor is the defending national champion. The Bears beat Gonzaga to win the 2021 title.

The 2022 NCAA tournament is scheduled to start with the First Four on March 15 and 16. The complete NCAA tournament schedule can be found here.

🚨 You can click or tap here to open the March Madness bracket as a .PDF in a new window.

NCAA bracket 2022: Printable March Madness bracket

Here is the complete schedule for the tournament, including dates, locations and venues by round. You can tap or click on each game to be taken directly to that live stream:

Here is more on how teams earn a spot in the NCAA bracket each season.

How are March Madness teams selected?

There are two ways that a team can earn a bid to the NCAA tournament. The 32 Division I conferences all receive an automatic bid (there were 31 in 2021), which they each award to the team that wins the postseason conference tournament. Regardless of how a team performed during the regular season, if they are eligible for postseason play and win their conference tournament, they are selected to receive a bid to the NCAA tournament. These teams are known as automatic qualifiers.

The second avenue for an invitation is an at-large bid. The selection committee (more on them in a second) convenes on Selection Sunday, after all regular season and conference tournament games are played, and decides which 36 teams (37 in 2021) that are not automatic qualifiers have the pedigree to earn an invitation to the tournament.

What is the March Madness selection committee?

The 10-member NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Committee is responsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the field for the NCAA Tournament. School and conference administrators are nominated by their conference, serve five-year terms and represent a cross-section of the Division I membership.

How do they decide which teams get an at-large bid?

There are a multitude of stats and rankings that the Selection Committee takes into account, but there is no set formula that determines whether a team receives an at-large bid or not.

What’s this thing called the NCAA evaluation tool?

The NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET, is a tool for the committee to evaluate the strength of individual teams. It replaces the RPI and was approved after months of consultation with the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, the National Association of Basketball Coaches, top basketball analytics experts and Google Cloud Professional Services. It includes game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin (capped at 10 points per game), and net offensive and defensive efficiency.

What is the importance of seeding in March Madness?

The men’s college basketball tournament is made up of 68 teams. On Selection Sunday, before any tournament game is played, those teams are ranked 1 through 68 by the Selection Committee, with the best team in college basketball — based on regular season and conference tournament performance — sitting at No. 1. Four of those teams are eliminated in the opening round of the tournament (known as the First Four), leaving us with a field of 64 for the first round.

Those 64 teams are split into four regions of 16 teams each, with each team being ranked 1 through 16. That ranking is the team’s seed.

In order to reward better teams, first-round matchups are determined by pitting the top team in the region against the bottom team (No. 1 vs. No. 16). Then the next highest vs. the next lowest (No. 2 vs. No. 15), and so on. In theory, this means that the 1 seeds have the easiest opening matchup to win in the bracket.

What is a Cinderella?

Much like the titular character from the fairy tale, a Cinderella team is one that is much more successful than expected. Examples in March would be Villanova’s 1985 championship run, when the eighth-seeded Wildcats became the lowest seeded team to ever win the title, knocking off the heavy favorite Georgetown.

Who has won every NCAA tournament?

Thirty-six different teams have won a championship, but no team has won more than UCLA, which has 11, 10 of which came a span of 12 years from 1964 to 1975.

Previous March Madness winners

Here is the list of every men’s basketball national championship since the NCAA tournament began in 1939:

*Louisville’s participation in the 2013 tournament was later vacated by the Committee on Infractions.