What March Madness Can Teach Us About the Economic Geography of Sports

The bracket for this year's NCAA March Madness men's basketball tournament has at last been announced, and soothsaying about which teams will make it to the Final Four has already begun.

Geographically speaking, one thing is abundantly clear: The majority of March Madness teams hail from small and mid-size metros (those with less than one million people) and college towns. Roughly 60 percent of this 2012 NCAA tournament teams come from small and mid-size metros. Just 10 percent hail from the nation's ten largest metros. Only one of the top 16 seeds, Georgetown in Washington D.C., comes from a top-ten metro. All four of the top seeds—Kentucky, Syracuse, North Carolina, and Michigan State—are located in small and mid-size metros.