Learning the rules of the brackets in the NCAA basketball tournaments is important if you are rooting for a men's college basketball team. On Selection Sunday, held early in March each year, a committee of college athletic directors selects 37 teams to play in the 68-team tourney. They join 31 conference champions. The teams will be seeded from first to 68th and placed in four regional tourneys.
Format
The 68 teams play in four regions. The teams ranked first in each region begin play by playing the winner of the game between the 16th- and 17th-ranked teams in each region. The second-ranked team plays the 15th seed in the round of 64, the third-ranked team plays the 14th seed and so on.
Seeding
Teams are not reseeded after each round. If a 16th-ranked team beats a No. 1 seed, it would face the winner of the game between the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds in the next round. If teams were reseeded in the NCAA tournament, the 16th-ranked team would have to beat the highest remaining seed in each round.
Regions
The regions are based on the site of the games. This was not the case for several decades. UCLA had a major advantage when it won 10 NCAA titles between 1964 and 1975 because the teams in the West Regional were Western teams and the East, Midwest and South all had significantly stronger teams. UCLA beat nonpowers such as Pacific, Santa Clara and Utah State in West Regional finals. In the 1970 NCAA tournament, the West Regional teams were UCLA, Long Beach State, Weber State, Utah State, UTEP and Santa Clara. In 2010, by contrast, the top six seeded teams in the West Regional were non-Western teams Syracuse, Kansas State, Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt, Butler and Xavier.
Schedule
In the tournament's first week, the two lowest-seeded teams in each region play each other on Tuesday and Wednesday in Dayton, Ohio. The winners in these "First Four" games advance to the round of 64. The 32 second-round games are played on Thursday and Friday at eight sites. The winners play in third-round games on Saturday and Sunday. The 16 winners play the next Thursday and Friday, with those eight winners advancing to four regional final games on Saturday and Sunday. The next weekend, the Final Four national semifinals are played on Saturday with the championship game on Monday.
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