Blank Bracket

A blank bracket is a diagram used to keep track of teams that compete against each other in a tournament. The bracket system is perhaps most-widely known to be used in the March Madness NCAA Basketball tournaments in which teams compete for the national championship. The teams are seeded and divided into four regional brackets, the East, West, South and Midwest. The winners of each of the regional brackets gather at the Final Four to determine the overall champion.

Bracket-style tournaments are also used in the NFL Playoffs, containing 12 teams, MLB Playoffs, with eight teams, NHL Playoffs and NBA Playoffs, featuring 16 teams each. While the idea has been proposed, NCAA Football does not use a bracket-style tournament to determine the national champion, but rather the Bowl Championship Series.

Single elimination brackets allow each team to compete until they have lost. In double elimination tournament brackets, the losers for each match get a second chance to compete and the winner from the losers bracket competes with the winners from the winners bracket to determine the champion. For both single and double elimination tournaments competing teams must be some power of two, meaning four, eight, 16, 32 or 64 teams. It is possible to have a different number and randomly pass extra extra teams on to the next set of competitions.

East Regional Bracket

Midwest Regional Bracket

South Regional Bracket

West Regional Bracket