## Update: this competition has been cancelled on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a result of the continued collaboration between Google Cloud and the NCAA®, the
seventh
annual Kaggle-backed March Madness® competition is underway! Another year, another chance to anticipate the upsets, call the probabilities, and put your bracketology skills to the leaderboard test. Kagglers will join the millions of fans who attempt to forecast the outcomes of March Madness during this year's NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championships. But unlike most fans, you will pick your bracket using a combination of NCAA’s historical data and your computing power, while the ground truth unfolds on national television.
![March Madness Imagery](https://storage.googleapis.com/kaggle-media/competitions/march-madness-2018/lockup_cloud.png)
In the first stage of the competition, Kagglers will rely on results of past tournaments to build and test models. We encourage you to post any useful external data as a
[dataset](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets?modal=true)
.
In the second stage, competitors will forecast outcomes of all possible matchups in the 2020 NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championships. You don't need to participate in the first stage to enter the second. The first stage exists to incentivize model building and provide a means to score predictions. The real competition is forecasting the 2020 results.
As the official public cloud provider of the NCAA, Google is proud to provide a competition to help participants strengthen their knowledge of basketball, statistics, data modeling, and cloud technology. As part of its journey to the cloud, the NCAA has migrated 80+ years of historical and play-by-play data, from 90 championships and 24 sports, to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The NCAA has tapped into decades of historical basketball data using BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Datalab, Cloud Machine Learning and Cloud Dataflow, to power the analysis of team and player performance. The mission of the NCAA has long been about serving the needs of schools, their teams and students. Google Cloud is proud to support that mission by helping the NCAA use data and machine learning to better engage with its millions of fans, 500,000 student-athletes, and more than 19,000 teams. Game on!
This page is for the NCAA Division I Men's tournament. Check out the
[NCAA Division I Women's tournament here](https://www.kaggle.com/c/google-cloud-ncaa-march-madness-2020-division-1-womens-tournament)
.  If you want to extend your analysis then try out our Analytics Competition
[here](https://www.kaggle.com/c/march-madness-analytics-2020)