Seven days left of Championship Fortnight, and we’ve already eliminated more than 80 teams. There are still 228 teams alive in the Circle of March, but with three league champions decided Saturday (note the halos for Florida Gulf Coast, Harvard and Belmont below) and a couple more today, we’re slowly but surely whittling our way down to the final 68. Yesterday’s list of eliminated teams follows the CoM.

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.08.13)

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Another day, another round of eliminations. With Thursday’s conference tournament action in the books, another 12 teams came off the Circle, leaving a total of 278 teams heading into weekend action. Four more tourneys get under way on Friday — the America East, the MAAC, the SoCon, and the Sun Belt — to join the others that have already begun. It’s going to be a wild weekend, but the CoM will manage to keep up.

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.07.13)

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After two days of conference tournament action, we have now hit the under-300 mark. With 13 official eliminations on Wednesday, the CoM now sits at a robust 290 teams still alive for the 2013 national championship. The list of teams gone from yesterday is after the jump, but things will really start heating up through this weekend. The Valley gets under way tonight, followed by a ridiculous amount of mid-major action Friday and Saturday (including the OVC championship game).

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.06.13)

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We dropped the Circle of March from 310 teams to 303 on Tuesday, as the Big South and Horizon League Tournaments both got under way with seven games between them. The list of yesterday’s eliminated teams is underneath the CoM, but suffice it to say that you are unlikely to miss any of them. Today we’ll have five more league tourneys get under way — the Atlantic Sun, the NEC, the OVC, the Patriot League, and the WCC — which means a good number of logos will drop off the Circle in the next 24 hours. Check back Thursday to see how it looks!

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.05.13)

*Note that with the exception of the Ivy League, which has no postseason tournament, we will remove non-qualifiers for their conference tournaments at the end of the conference’s regular season.

• Radford
• UNC-Asheville
• Presbyterian
• Coastal Carolina
• Loyola (IL)
• Cleveland State
• Wisconsin-Milwaukee

March Madness is here, and as we put this post together on Tuesday afternoon, the first trickle of conference tournament action has already started with the Big South Tournament getting under way in Conway, South Carolina. Over the next 36 days, we’ll celebrate postseason basketball with our annual visual tribute from 300+ teams down to one, the Circle of March. Assuming our math is spot on, there are 310 Division I teams still “alive” for the NCAA title this season — 37 have already been eliminated for a variety of reasons (ineligibility, failure to qualify for or no conference tournament, not in an auto-bid league, independent, etc.). Those teams are listed below the Circle. The rest of the contenders will slowly be whittled away on a daily basis until we’re left with 68 on Selection Sunday and of course just one team standing tall on the morning of April 9.

To make this year’s CoM a bit more entertaining, we’ve built the logos of all 310 teams into a number of spatially-similar groupings within the Circle. For example, in the area approaching 11 o’clock below, there are a number of images that prominently use birds as their school’s logo. See how many of these groupings you can determine (note: make sure to click on the image for a larger view) — the first dozen folks who tweet at us (@rushthecourt) or e-mail us (rushthecourt@yahoo.com) with 12 or more distinct groupings will receive a free RTC t-shirt. For the person who identifies the most distinct logo groupings, we’ll have a grand prize.

Welcome to March Madness…

How Many Distinct Groupings of Logos Are in the Circle of March?

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.04.13)

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From 320+ schools to two, we’re down to the end of the Circle of March (April)…

And here’s a series of snapshots showing the progression of how we ended up here…

One more to go!

As unlikely a Final Four as we can remember, but one we’ll love just the same...

To see the progression of the CoM, check out all the previous posts here.

And down to eight teams still playing for the ‘ship.

From 32 to 16…  one of these remaining teams will be your national champion for 2011.  Who will it be?

From over 300 teams just over two weeks ago to only 32 now.  The Circle of March is slowly becoming a vast swath of white space…