The Real Winner of March Madness

Well, while all of your friends were watching which college basketball team would inch closer to the NCAA championship title, the media was mad about a much different race – the U.S. Presidential Election – this, according to new analysis by LexisNexis Newsdesk.

The NCAA basketball tournament is arguably the most talked about subject in the month of March – it is called March Madness for a reason, right? But with nearly 143,000 *more* articles written about the election in the past 30 days, Trump, Cruz, Kasich, Clinton and Sanders were the clear winners.

Despite our presidential candidates' stronghold on the media's attention, March 17, 18 and 19 – the first three days of "The Big Dance" – was the only time over the course of the month that coverage of the tournament overshadowed that of the election.

There's no doubt that a few shocking upsets at the hands of Middle Tennessee and Yale (sorry, Michigan State and Baylor), the tournament overshadowed this unpredictable election cycle… if only for a brief period of time. Sidenote: President Obama picked Kansas. Sorry, Prez - not this year.

Ahead of tonight's big final, North Carolina Tarheels and the Syracuse Orange have been the media darlings of the NCAA Tournament according to early media analysis. These teams enjoyed 15% and 5% more media coverage respectively over their Final Four counterparts - the Villanova Wildcats and Oklahoma Sooners.

So, which team do you think will win "The Tourney"? Who will be the 45^th President of the United States? We'll soon find out, but if there is one thing for sure, it's that both March Madness and the U.S. Presidential Election have something in common: unpredictability.

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Data and information powered by LexisNexis Newsdesk.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160404/350931

SOURCE LexisNexis