March Madness Calendar for iPhone, Mac, and iPad

UPDATE: the 2020 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, and the 2020 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, has been canceled. Read all about it on the NCAA’s site. Hopefully, we’ll have tournaments in 2021, and if we do, I’ll make the ics-format calendar for it.

Here is the 2019 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament calendar, in ics (iCal) form. It’s as up-to-the-minute as I can make it and I’ll keep updating it as games are played. Game times are correct for your time zone– none of that “All Times Eastern” stuff.

(I’ve also created the NBA Playoffs Calendar for iPhone and Mac. Check it out, and tell a friend!)

Bonus: if you subscribe to my calendar this year, and assuming I get some good feedback on it this year, I’ll do it again next year and you won’t have to do a thing. The games will magically appear in your calendar next March.

Getting the calendar is easy: all you have to do is click this link. When you do that, you’ll probably be asked whether it’s OK for Calendar to open the link. The answer is YES. When adding the calendar to your Mac you’ll get a box like this:

You’ll probably want to set things up similarly on your Mac. The important part is you want the calendar to refresh every day (or more frequently than that if you want).

Here’s the calendar on the iPhone. To get it, click the link and when asked about subscribing to the calendar “March Madness,” click “Subscribe.”

It also works with Google Calendar

Just right-click this link and copy it, go to Google Calendar (that is, use a web browser to go to calendar.google.com), and click the stack of three dots to the right of “Add calendar.” Choose the option to “Add from URL.” Paste in what you copied and you’re done. (Once added via a web browser you should see the calendar (in a few minutes) as an option in your Google Calendar mobile app. In that app, go to Settings (the three horizontal lines at top left), then “Show more” (below “Events” and “Reminders”). Check the box for March Madness and you’re all set.)

The URL you paste in should start with “webcal://.” If the URL starts with “webcal:%2f%2f” your browser has converted the URL using “URL Encoding.” In my experience, Chrome sometimes applies URL Encoding to URLs and Safari never does. The URL has to have slashes in it. If it doesn’t, manually change every instance of “%2f” to “/” and you’ll be all set. There are five slashes in the URL, starting with the two in a row after “webcal:”.

Google is very, very slow to update iCal-type calendars, so you may not see the calendar updating as I modify it to show the results and who’s advancing. Of course you can delete the calendar and add it again but that’s not much fun, and even then, you may get a cached version of the calendar, not an updated one. Bad. I wish I could do something about it, but it’s in Google’s hands.

(The calendar can easily be turned off by unchecking it in the Calendar app on the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Same thing in Google Calendar.)

The official March Madness app (for iPhone and iPad) has a lot of great features (best one: you can watch the games on your iPhone) but it doesn’t integrate with the Calendar app on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad. That’s where my calendar comes in: it shows up in the Calendar app. I couldn’t find such a calendar online so I made it myself.

I make a similar calendar for the College Football Bowl Games every year. Subscribe to that one and get the schedules, year after year. I do listen to feedback (in fact, that’s why I’m doing the March Madness calendar), so please let me know (via the comments) if you have a suggestion or correction. I’d really appreciate it.

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