INDIANAPOLIS — The huge bracket for March Madness is now filled out on the front of the JW Marriott hotel in downtown Indianapolis.
A crew of four, perched high above the city, filled in the tournament team names for what's now the visual focal point of the 2021 NCAA Tournament.
Even in a heavy morning fog, Frank Hancock knows what his company created is a beacon to basketball fans.
"Aw, this is beautiful," Hancock, the president and CEO of Sport Graphics said, neck craned, gazing at the hotel's façade. "I mean, that's...that's a big bracket!"
The 47,000 square foot billboard loudly and proudly declares Indiana home to March Madness.
"This is like a thumb in the horizon sticking up, especially when they light this thing tonight," Hancock said.
"I mean you can see it from everywhere. When you're flying in from a plane, you can see it on the plane when you're flying into town, so I think that's pretty cool," added Sport Graphics project manager Andy King.
Sport Graphics created this massive masterpiece, much like they did with a previous hotel poster that pictured the Lombardi Super Bowl trophy, another with the Borg Warner trophy for the Indy 500 and a slightly smaller NCAA bracket in 2015 for the Final Four in Indianapolis.
This one, with 800 panels, took 100 hours to print.
On Tuesday, four crew members with Sport Graphics scaled Indy's largest hotel to fill out what's now the world's largest bracket.
"We've labeled and numbered all the boxes with all the graphics that are going to go up on there and they're loaded on the stages," King explained.
"What they're going up right now, they're taking off the white on there so they can drop the team names in," Hancock added.
Once the blank spaces are removed, four-foot-tall vinyl stickers are smoothed onto the hotel with a squeegee, revealing teams in the tournament: the short names, the long names and the exact name many local fans hope will go all the way.
"Oh yes, Purdue will be up there," Hancock said. "If they go far that would be great. That would be great."
Sixty of the 64 teams that will end up on the bracket went up in about three hours Tuesday. Teams from the play-in games go up Thursday. Through this whole process, King is in charge of quality control.
He stood on a rooftop, across the street from the hotel, double and triple checking to prevent any gigantic errors on that gigantic bracket.
"I'm just down here with a (paper) bracket in hand, to make sure that as they're going up, they're putting the right teams in the right spots and that we have a finished bracket that looks just like the real one," King explained.
This year's bracket, unlike the one in 2015, will be live, with winning teams updated daily.
"After each night of games, provided the weather holds out, we'll come out and stick up the winners so the teams can see them advance as they advance," King said.
"Also, teams are going to come up and have team pictures up here, with the bracket behind them, which is pretty neat too," Hancock said.
The very players staying at the hotel for the NCAA bubble, will get to watch a larger-than life "survive and advance."
And fans get a giant reminder that in Indiana, basketball is king.
"The tournament's the best time of the year in my opinion," King said. "So to have it here and to be a part of it and to have something this cool is pretty neat."
After the championship game, Hancock says the winning team's logo will go up in the center of the large bracket and stay there for a week.