The Elite Eight also known as the Round of Eight during the March Madness tournament, is the stage of the NCAA tournament which the final eight teams compete in four matches to determine who will advance. Those four winners will move on to the Semi-Finals, or in March Madness terms – the Final Four.

In 1939, NCAA college basketball held their first ever championship tournament. Eighty years ago, that NCAA tournament started out with just eight teams in the entire bracket. In comparison, the 2021 tournament has 60 more teams competing for the NCAA championship for a total of sixty-eight teams. The inaugural tournament’s first day is what we consider the quarterfinals or casually referred to as “Elite Eight”. It’s amazing to think about how much NCAA basketball has grown since then.

What is the Elite 8?

Elite Eight is a casual way of phrasing the Quarterfinals of the NCAA basketball tournament, but Elite Eight also depends on when the phrase was mentioned. Today’s modern definition means that you’re one of the final eight teams that have fought through three rounds of March Madness to emerge as one of the eight remaining teams.

However, if you were to refer to “Elite Eight” in 1942, for example, another moniker for the Elite Eight was the “Exclusive Eight.” That’s because it meant you were one of the top basketball teams in the country, your team was one of only eight teams selected to play in the exclusive college basketball tournament.

Printable Elite Eight Brackets in PDF

When searching for high quality brackets for this round of March Madness, we found there wasn’t too many appetizing choices and that inspired us to design a few printable Elite Eight brackets.  As with other rounds of March Madness, we’ve provided many printable brackets for all your tournament needs.

So whether it’s the Kentucky Wildcats, Duke, UCLA Bruins, Michigan Wolverines or any other of the college teams familiar with this round of March Madness, you’ll find that our brackets will fulfill your NCAA tournament bracket needs.

You’ll see that our Elite Eight bracket is free of any malware: no extra content taking up too much space text  and there’s no time stamp, so you can use any of these brackets in the future. To print out one of the above Elite 8 brackets, you can click here for the PDF format of the orange/blue elite-8 bracket or you can choose to have the black/white version (PDF).

We also offer a simple blank 8 team bracket and is perfect for using for any four game, single-elimination tournament whether it’s for March Madness, football, baseball or any sport for that matter.

If this eight team bracket isn’t good for you and you’re looking for the larger NCAA Tournament brackets from this year’s previous rounds, we have those brackets and we’re just so happy that you asked.

Since the beginning of the tournament, we’ve created and published brackets at every round of the tourney, from the March Madness tournament bracket to completely blank brackets, to the Round of 32, all the way to the the Sweet Sixteen.