Selection Sunday
Selection Sunday is the day when the NCAA College basketball tournament participants are placed, seeded accordingly, and announced. Both CBS and ESPN cover the selections for the men's tournament live; ESPN also covers selections for the women's tournament live on Selection Monday. The NCAA committee gathers to select and place 68 men's teams and 64 women's teams that secured or are deemed worthy of an invitation to the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship and the NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship basketball tournaments that take place in March and April.
CBS has the official rights to cover the selection of the men's tournament field as they are the TV network which covers the vast majority of the tournament. (CBS held exclusive TV rights to the men's tournament from 1991 to 2010, and have shared rights with Turner Sports since 2011.) For this reason, CBS announces each bracket first, with ESPN passing on the brackets to its viewers mere moments later. Both networks' coverage is augmented by discussion of the selections and predictions about how teams will fare once the tournament begins. ESPN has exclusive rights to cover the women's tournament selection announcements, as that network has sole rights to the women's tournament. Before 2006, the women's matchups were made in a selection show airing one hour before the men's matchups. However, beginning in 2006, the women's matchups have been announced by ESPN on Selection Monday. The Selection Monday move allows ESPN to provide more prominent coverage on women's basketball instead of providing token coverage for the women before devoting the rest of the evening on the men's tournament matchups; it also allows minor coverage of the secondary National Invitation Tournament, to which ESPN also holds full rights.
Both CBS and ESPN send camera crews to schools around the nation to capture the teams' (and occasionally fans') reactions the moment they find out what seed they received or if they even made the tournament at all. Once the teams are announced, the teams and their fans begin to make game plan and travel preparations. Additionally, millions of college basketball fans begin to fill in their brackets, usually as part of March Madness pools conducted through websites, gambling-related contests, or simply through a group of friends or co-workers.
Read more about this topic: NCAA Basketball Tournament Selection Process
Famous quotes containing the words selection and/or sunday:
“When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny”
—Archie Randolph Ammons (b. 1926)
“Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)