Marquette Is Left Out Of The 2018 NCAA Tournament

Welcome to Selection Sunday, everyone.

A couple of things to discuss to prepare you for this evening’s festivities:

1. The Selection Show will be televised on TBS;
2. They will be announcing the 68 teams that made it in first, and then announcing the games in the bracket after that.

Just to make it clear that everyone understands: The American Athletic Conference championship game airs on CBS at 2:30pm. That game is going to end at some point after 4:30pm or so, and then you are going to have to change the channel to TBS. That broadcast will not just go straight into the Selection Show.

Once the show starts, Greg Gumbel and Ernie Johnson will be firing through all 68 teams in the field, presumably straight through, 1 through 68. According to CBS Sports, this will take place all in the first 10 minutes of the show. Once that is squared away, the show will then spend the next 30 minutes announcing the brackets and game by game matchups for the first round of the NCAA tournament.

This is, of course, a change from how things usually transpire. Usually it’s an announcement of the four #1 seeds, then the announcement of the first region. That’s followed by a commercial break, another region, maybe two, another commercial break, and then they wrap up the bracket before moving on to analysis and a chat with the selection committee chairperson. Without seeing how it actually transpires, I’m intrigued to see how this shakes out. All of the bubble teams are going to find out in the first 10 minutes whether they’re in or out as opposed to having to wait until 30 minutes into the show when all four regions are announced.

It’s an interesting change, and I’m fascinated to see if this works out for Turner Sports, CBS Sports, and the NCAA. It’s possible that they might get a whole bunch of people tuning out after the first 10 minutes once they know if their team is in or out. Perhaps not likely, but it is possible. “This is the way we’ve always done it” is never the right reason to continue doing something, so I appreciate a little bit of experimentation.

Well, at least as long as said experimentation isn’t “announce region, let Charles Barkley offer his thoughts for 15 minutes, take commercial break, announce next region, let Kenny Smith yammer for 15 minutes, commercial break, etc.” That was not a good television product.

In terms of Marquette’s chances of hearing their name read.... well.... things are not looking so hot. Bracket Matrix last updated on Saturday at 9pm, which means it’s probably getting all of Friday’s results worked in but none of Saturday’s, and Marquette appears in just nine of the 140 brackets. That has the Golden Eagles as the sixth team out. Joe Lunardi’s most recent bracket is dated today and says that the Golden Eagles are the seventh team out. Chris Dobbertean, who was bullish on the Golden Eagles about a week ago, says that they’re the fourth team out as of 5:30pm last night. T-Rank’s bracketology calculations has Marquette as the third team out with a 45% chance of making it into the field.

But hey, weirder things have happened.

2018 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection Show

Date: Sunday, March 11, 2018
Time: 5pm Central
Television: TBS
Streaming: March Madness Live