Following in the footsteps of the College Football Playoff, the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee will be unveiling the top 16 teams in a televised Feb. 11th special, the first-ever bracket preview show.
Michigan State AD Mark Hollis will be in studio with Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis to unveil what the bracket would look like on Feb. 11th, seeding the top four teams in each region and, essentially, giving a snapshot of how the best teams in the country stand up at that moment in time.
“We are excited about giving the fans a glimpse to what the men’s basketball committee is thinking at this point of the season, and creating a buzz as we look towards Selection Sunday,” Hollis said in the NCAA’s release. “It’s important to recognize after this list has been released, there is still a significant portion of the regular season to be played and every league must stage its conference tournament. There’s potential for quite a bit of movement until we do it for real March 12, but this early peek will give everyone insight as to where the committee stands as we hit the stretch run of the regular season.”
On the one hand, I hate the idea of this. It’s a way to create ratings for a TV show that is going to make the public at-large expect the committee to hold to their projections, and it helps to spoil one of the best things about Selection Sunday: the shock of the bracket reveal. This is a slippery slope. If millions and millions of people tune in, the next step is to make this a weekly occurrence the way that the College Football Playoff reveal is a weekly occurrence.
The other issue is that it will box the committee into decisions before we have all the data. Forming an opinion when there are still a third of conference play and conference tournaments left is a dangerous thing to do.
But the show is also going to create buzz.
There’s no denying that, on Tuesday nights during college football season, the biggest story in all of sports is how the college football rankings shake out. Who is projected to be in the Final Four? Who is getting left out? It dominates social, it dominates the blogosphere, it dominates discussion on sports talk radio and shows like First Take and PTI.
And how often do we lament the fact that college basketball doesn’t dominates headlines or sports talk until the tournament starts? How often do we say that this is a sport that only matters in March? How often do we try and drum up different events in November and December as ways to drive interest in college hoops?
This show will do that, and for the most part, it’s generally harmless. There is more than a month between the bracket preview and the bracket reveal. That’s a quarter of the season, before you factor in conference tournaments.
It’s also worth pointing out that there really is no difference between this reveal and bringing on any other armchair bracketologist to discuss who might end up being a No. 1 seed. These discussions are had on every show and in every college basketball story written between the end of the Super Bowl and the start of the NCAA tournament. This show cuts out the middlemen and goes straight to the source: the Chair of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee.
It’s also worth noting that, unlike its college football counterpart, this reveal will include 16 teams everyone knows are locks to be in the NCAA tournament. So someone projected as a No. 1 seed falls to a No. 3 seed because their late-season schedule was weak and they lost two games they shouldn’t have. Whatever. That team is still in the tournament. If the NCAA really wanted things to get interesting, they’d project the 10 seeds, 11 seeds and the First Four, which are usually the last 8-10 teams to receive at-large bids.
All in all, this is probably a net-positive for college basketball, and it seems unlikely that we’re only going to have one bracket reveal in future years. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this turn into a weekly deal.
I don’t have to love it.
But we might as well make peace with it.
