- Apple Sports added brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament
- They are a nice eye tracking system for March Madness.
- You cannot complete them in advance.
Apple Sports has joined March Madness with a new tool to help you keep track.
Sure, the number of people who care about college sports may be small, but those numbers are misleading when you take into account the seemingly universal appeal of what’s known as “The Big Dance.”
If only one in ten Americans follow college sports, the number of fans increases dramatically when you wonder how many are in the March Madness pools. The tournament begins on March 19 and will run until April 6.
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These brackets, which track the standings of 64 men’s college basketball teams (and another 64 in the women’s tournament), develop over multiple rounds until ultimately only two teams remain. They promote friendly competitions based on chance throughout the country.
The NCAA tournaments attract avid college basketball fans and casual observers like me, who filled out a bracket based on whether I’d ever heard the college team’s name.
If you fill out a bracket on paper, like I did, you may find it difficult to keep track of all the results of the game; More than a dozen games can be played in a day. It’s best to do it digitally, and if you follow sporting events like the March Madness tournament, Apple Sports made it a little easier.
When I spoke with Apple’s Eddy Cue in 2024 about the launch of Apple Sports and the features he wanted to add, March Madness was at the top of his list. “You have this issue of brackets and understanding them, and it’s not just about showing punctuation and stuff. We have ideas about what to do.”
Match coverage arrived shortly after, but without any way to view all 190 matches from the men’s and women’s tournaments. Now, however, that has changed, with full bracket views that allow you to follow every game and watch your teams progress through the rounds, from the Sweet 16 to the Elite Eight, Final Four, and even the Championship Game.
Of course, it will also help you see how your support broke.
Those in the groups choose teams to win at each stage, and if a team you chose to go the distance or to the end loses early, your group is effectively broken and you lose the group (which may or may not include winning money).
I can choose a game, track it, and even see the betting odds for that particular game. What’s missing is some way to create your own bracket within the Sports app and then compare it to actual tournament results. I also wish I could zoom out and see the bracket in its entirety. Instead, you can only swipe left to view each round.
Still, it’s a nice and long-desired addition to Apple’s Sports app that will help support my once-a-year, fleeting three-week interest in college basketball.
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