Who Owns March Madness and the Sweet Sixteen? Hint, Kentucky and Illinois have something to say about it!

My Louisville Cardinals got bounced in the first round of the Big East Tournament by the Cincinnati Bearcats so, while the Cardinals will likely make the tournament, their likely low seeding will ensure they have their work cut out for them in the NCAA Tournament.

Here in Kentucky we take basketball seriously, and March Madness is (second to Derby) our favorite time of year.  Illinois takes basketball seriously, too (four Final Fours).  But what you basketabll lovers may not know is that Kentucky and Indiana both squared off with the NCAA over the use of two terms surrounding The Big Dance. 

Let's start with some background.  The NCAA has trademarked the terms March Madness, Final Four, The Big Dance, Elite Eight, Final Four, and a ton of others you may or may not have heard of.

According to the Slate "Every year, the NCAA sends hundreds of cease and desist letters to websites, bars and casinos that use one or more of the NCAA's trademarked slogans without the NCAA's permission.  The NCAA has to protect its trademarks to maintain their value. Letting any business offer an "Elite Eight Special," for example, hurts the association's ability to get top dollar from official sponsors, lawyers say.  That means allowing no posters on doors of casinos inviting people to March Madness gambling, no Internet ads luring people to websites where they can buy unauthorized March Madness gear and no March Madness Web banners trying to get people to bars or events that aren't NCAA sponsors. 

The phrase March Madness can be traced back to an Illinois' statewide high-school basketball tournament, which began in 1908. In 1939, an official with the Illinois High School Association, Henry V. Porter, penned an article called "March Madness" for the organization's in-house magazine. "A little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel," he wrote. Three years later, he followed up with a poem, "Basketball Ides of March," which read in part: "A sharp-shooting mite is king tonight/ The Madness of March is running.  "The phrase was confined to Illinois high-school ball until 1982, when CBS broadcaster (and ex-Chicago Daily News sportswriter) Brent Musburger used it during his network's NCAA tournament coverage. The IHSA, meanwhile, applied to trademark "March Madness" in 1989. The NCAA and IHSA clashed in 1996, when the IHSA sued to stop GTE, an NCAA corporate partner, from distributing a CD-ROM game bearing the March Madness title. The NCAA contended that it had a common-law trademark on the phrase and was thus allowed to license it at will. The 7^th Circuit Court sided with the NCAA, but its ruling was vague enough to open the door for future litigation. Rather than endure more rounds in court, the two sides agreed to form the March Madness Athletic Association, a joint holding company. The IHSA controls the name on the high-school level, while the NCAA has a perpetual license to use the phrase in connection with its (much larger) collegiate tournament.  A similar clash occurred in the late 1990s over "Sweet 16," tourney slang for the third round. CBS commentators started using the phrase in the late 1980s, after the tournament field expanded from 53 to 64 teams. Unfortunately for the NCAA, the phrase (using both "16" and "Sixteen") was trademarked by the Kentucky High School Athletic Association in 1988, as a handle for its annual championship tournament. Perhaps mindful of the March Madness precedent, however, the KHSAA chose to bargain with the NCAA rather than litigate. The two sides struck a deal similar to the one between the IHSA and the NCAA, splitting control along scholastic-collegiate lines. (The NCAA also owns the trademark to "Elite Eight," though the exact origins of that phrase are unclear.)

There are some high-school basketball purists who insist that the phrase "Final Four" was first used in connection with Indiana's legendary annual tournament (which inspired the film Hoosiers). But the official NCAA story is that "Final Four" was coined by a Cleveland Plain Dealer sportswriter, Ed Chay. In a 1975 article for the Official Collegiate Basketball Guide, Chay wrote that Al McGuire's Marquette squad "was one of the final four" in the previous year's tournament. Something about the phrase struck a chord with the NCAA's marketing folks, and they started capitalizing it as "Final Four" in 1978. It is, of course, now trademarked. (College hockey is stuck with the nickname "Frozen Four" for its national semifinals.) The origin of "Big Dance" is seemingly lost to history, at least in terms of who first used it as a synonym for March Madness. Nevertheless, the NCAA trademarked the phrase in 2000."