As you know, the first two rounds of March Madness—well, the first two real rounds—together constitute the best sports event of the year. In 48 games, teams you've maybe only vaguely heard of get their chance to knock off the teams you've heard too much of, and every year you're rewarded with at least a couple "holy shit!" moments. But who are these underdogs? And where do they come from?


In case you haven't been following, the map above shows the conferences whose tournaments have reached their championship game, excluding the Big Six conferences. Check out the annotations for a brief rundown of these 14 fourteen games, which give us some of our earliest March Madness entrants.