- Apple Sports added brackets for the NCAA Basketball tournament
- They’re a nice visual tracking system for March Madness
- You can’t fill them out 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 might be small, but those numbers are deceiving 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 rises dramatically when you ask how many are in March Madness pools. The tournament kicks off March 19 and runs through April 6.
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These pools, which track brackets for 64 men’s college basketball teams (and another 64 in the women’s tournament), play out over multiple rounds until, ultimately, just two teams remain. They drive friendly, chance-based competitions across the country.
The NCAA tournaments suck in fervent 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, as I did, you might struggle to keep track of all the game results; more than a dozen games can be played in a day. Doing it digitally is best, and if you follow sporting events like the March Madness tournament, Apple Sports just made it a little easier.
When I spoke to Apple’s Eddy Cue back in 2024 about the launch of Apple Sports and features he wanted to add, March Madness was at the top of his list. “You have this issue of brackets and understanding that, and it’s not just a simple showing a score and things. We’ve got ideas on what to do.”
Coverage of the games arrived soon after, but without any way to visualize all 190 matches of the Men’s and Women’s tournaments. Now, though, that’s changed, with full bracket views that let you track 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 bracket broke.
Those in pools choose teams to win at each stage, and if a team you picked to go far or all the way loses early, your bracket is effectively broken, and you lose the pool (which may or may not include winning money).
I can choose a game, track it, and even see betting odds for the particular game. What’s missing is any way to build your own bracket within the Sports App and then compare that with the actual tournament results. I also wish that I could zoom out and see the bracket in its entirety. Instead, you can only swipe left to see each round.
Still, it’s a nice and long-desired addition to Apple’s Sports app that will help support my fleeting, three-week once-a-year interest in College basketball.
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