This night, on ESPN, the wall-to-wall protection of postseason collegiate basketball begins with a program referred to as Bracketology, the place pundits and consultants talk about the sector earlier than play begins on the boys’s facet on Tuesday night.
This system additionally has an attention-grabbing tagline: “Discipline of 136.”
Huh? Wait a second. There are 68 groups within the males’s bracket.
Has been that approach since 2011, with video games often held in Dayton, Ohio, within the heart of the nation. The reason being that when the Mountain West Convention organized and have become eligible to get an computerized qualifier into the match, the NCAA didn’t need to grant one fewer at-large bid.
Properly, after the kerfuffle about inequality between the NCAA Division I males’s and girls’s Division I basketball tournaments uncovered by the Sedona Prince TikTok video, there have been important modifications within the ladies’s championship.
The phrases “March Insanity” will now be on the courts of the ladies’s video games. And there can be upgraded journey and accomodations.
And now, a 68-team discipline.
Now, in relation to the expanded discipline, I ponder if there can be any probability for the 4 pigtail winners will ever get to the nationwide semifinals. Just one crew on the boys’s facet have made it from the First 4 play-in recreation to the Ultimate 4, and that was UCLA in final 12 months’s match.
The factor is, there’s nonetheless a small measure of inequality in relation to the brand new bracket; the eight groups within the 4 play-in video games don’t play two double-headers like they do within the males’s match. the groups picked for the pigtail matches go to High 16 seeds for on-campus matchups.
And so it goes.
