March Madness is happening as we speak, so to accurately follow all the game action during the upcoming first round match ups all the way to the Sweet 16 and Elite 8, it’s necessary for college basketball fans to have access to a printable March Madness Brackets, or one they can get to online.

Having a go to bracket is especially true if you’re brand new to paying attention to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament because following along with all the matches is impossible without.

You have a lot of options out there in the interwebs, so we’re glad you’ve come to the Interbasket. Here we have published our favorite brackets (that’s right, that’s a thing) that we’ve identified across the major sports sites. So if you have a preferred website or a beautiful March Madness bracket that we’ve missed out on, leave us a comment in the comments. We want to be the one-stop shop for NCAA brackets.

How Did the 2018 March Madness Brackets Come to Be?

The 2018 March Madness Brackets were being discussed by the NCAA College Basketball Selection Committee for weeks before Championship Sunday. We’re certain that the members were exchanging messages about which teams were essential locks and which were on the bubble. After all the conference tournaments ended gave light to some of the field and made their jobs a little easier. TBS Sports then announced the finalized brackets at 6 PM EST during the NCAA Selection Sunday broadcast on March 11, 2018. In this year’s tournament, the four #1 seeds were Virginia, Villanova, Kansas and Xavier.

Which March Madness Brackets is Worth Printing?

If you’ve seen as many interactive and printable and blank and PDF March Madness brackets as we’ve seen over the last few weeks, then you would know that not all brackets are created equal. Just because there’s a tournament bracket provided by a reputable sports company doesn’t mean they got it right. Brackets come in different types, but they also come in different designs, formats, and in different colors. So if you’re looking for a printable bracket for March Madness — why not choose one that’s well-designed and gets you excited for the tournament as opposed to some basic, black and white version?

Convinced? Great! We’ve gone through the trouble of locating the most popular brackets on the internet including ESPN, CBS Sports, and the official bracket from the NCAA, as well as the best ones — they’re not always synonymous.

Interbasket’s Printable March Madness Brackets

As you read about earlier, we’ve included many of the larger sports sites’ brackets including printable in Excel or PDF, as well as online, fillable March Madness brackets that you can interact with on whatever device. This is all in addition to the brackets that we’ve already created and published out. You can see them, download them and print them out here:

• Printable March Madness Bracket PDF | Word | Post
• Filled College Basketball Bracket Post
• Empty March Madness Bracket: PDF | Excel | Post
• Complete March Madness Bracket PDF | Excel | Post

In any case, take a look at the following brackets from ESPN, CBS Sports, NCAA.com and a handful of other websites that we thought created the best March Madness brackets on the ‘net — at least for the 2018 tournament.

USA Today’s Colorful 2018 March Madness Bracket (Interactive)

We love the colorful, daily newspaper’s take on this year’s bracket. The link here takes you to the interactive, online version. Though very bold and playfully designed, we don’t like that you can’t have a full view of the bracket on the screen — having to scroll to see all the match ups isn’t ideal.

ESPN March Madness Tournament Bracket are a Snore (2018)

ESPN doesn’t have the best-looking bracket with it’s gray, black, white and brown color scheme along with no college logos. However, the huge sports network does offer all types of version in one screen: interactive, printable and PDF versions. ESPN has provided another quality, though not the most exciting, March Madness bracket for the 2018 tournament.

NCAA.com’s Much Improved March Madness Bracket

Maybe they finally realized the demand for brackets, so the NCAA 2018 March Madness bracket has taken huge steps and made significant improvement over the bracket they published from a few years ago. Color us impressed by the umbrella organization. For a boring overseers of collegiate athletics, their bracket is colorful, playful and looks a lot more fun than most brackets that have a lot more freedom to do more.

CBS Sports March Madness Bracket

That took way too long. Searching on CBS Sports bracket took me to their tournament challenge, so I had to click around on their nav to figure out where their interactive (live) bracket was located. Too much work. I bet they’re losing a ton of visitors due to this poor experience. Not just that, when we got there we found an uninspired live bracket decked in blue with no logos.

CBS Sports used to be the first to plublish out a March Madness bracket because they produced and broadcastes the Selection Sunday show. They used to be a major March Madness presence, but looks like they’re struggling a bit to find their footing without insider access.

Syracuse.com’s March Madness Bracket (PDF only)

Even though Syracuse.com isn’t considered a major player in sports news, we’ve always been very impressed by the college’s March Madness bracket. They do a great job of designing the brackets that make it feel as if it was actually created as opposed to just black lines. They add in accent colors and background images. The kicker is that they insert advertisers/sponsors too, but somehow their logos don’t overtake or take up too much space.

Our only qualm is that they don’t seem to have an online version — not one you can view on screen without opening up their PDF version. Otherwise, Syracuse’s printable version of the March Madness Brackets is definitely one of our favorites — it’s both high quality and spaced out nicely.

2018 Bracket for March Madness from Team Rankings

One of the bigger players in the bracket game, but isn’t a huge household name is TeamRankings.com  — if you’ve done any searching on the engines for brackets, they have a healthy presence. However, how do their brackets hold up against the other brackets? Not great — they provide a black and white bracket and don’t offer an online version .

Even though it’s plain with zero color, no college logos, or highlights, we can say that it’s better than ESPN’s which gives you a sense of wanting to do more, but comes up way short. Their website is a good resource for those looking for a clean, basic bracket in PDF filetype without much clutter. We also don’t like the sponsor on their 2018 bracket.

As you can see, there can be a lot more to printable March Madness brackets than just placing dozens of black, interconnected straight lines that form a bracket and typing out a title at the top.  For the most perfect, best March Madness bracket (at least, aestheticaly), the bracket has to have good spacing for one to write on, good design, some diversity in color, include the logos of the colleges in each bracket as well as ensuring that if it includes an advertiser, that it’s not too overt.  Let’s raise the bracket game!