One year after the pandemic-induced cancellation of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament resulted in a $600 million decline in the N.C.A.A.’s revenue for 2020, March Madness is back in 2021.
This year, the entire 68-team tournament will take place in Indiana as the N.C.A.A. tries to limit travel during the pandemic.
The tournament starts Thursday with the First Four games and ends with the national title game on April 5. But first comes Selection Sunday, when the entire 68-team field will be revealed, including 31 automatic qualifiers and 37 at-large bids.
Here are some things to consider before the reveal, which starts at 6 p.m. Eastern time on CBS:
There is a trio of favorites.
Gonzaga, Baylor and Michigan appear to be locks for three of the four No. 1 seeds, with Illinois in prime position to be the fourth; that would give the loaded Big Ten Conference two top seeds. The Bulldogs, the Bears and the Wolverines are also the three top betting favorites for the championship.
Under Coach Mark Few, No. 1-ranked Gonzaga has won a program-record 30 straight games over two seasons and will be the first team since Kentucky in 2015, and the 16th over all, to enter an N.C.A.A. tournament undefeated. (That 2015 Kentucky team lost to Wisconsin in a national semifinal.)
No. 2 Baylor won its first 17 games before needing to take a three-week break because of coronavirus problems within the program. It rebounded to win four straight games.
“Everybody would love to be the No. 1, because you want to be the best,” Baylor Coach Scott Drew said last month. “At the same time, we all know that the ranking at the end of the year is the one that matters most.”
Under Coach Juwan Howard, the regular-season Big Ten champion Michigan is expected to be a No. 1 seed for the first time since the 1992-93 season, when Howard was a member of the team’s famed “Fab Five.”
Illinois features a dynamic duo in the junior point guard Ayo Dosunmu and the imposing sophomore center Kofi Cockburn. The Illini haven’t been a top seed since 2005, when they advanced to the championship game.
Alabama, the regular-season Southeastern Conference champion, and Iowa, which features the Player of the Year Award favorite Luka Garza, appear to be strongly positioned for No. 2 seeds, which Ohio State, Houston and Oklahoma State were also jockeying for as the conference tournaments finished up.
The teams on the bubble include Syracuse.
If it’s March, it must mean Syracuse is on the tournament bubble.
In five of the last six years, the Orange have entered Selection Sunday with questionable chances of making the tournament. They got into the field of 68 in 2016, 2018 and 2019 but in 2017 were relegated to the N.I.T.
The Orange (16-9), who pushed Virginia, the No. 1 seed in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, on Thursday before losing on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer, have a solid case for making the field. Some bracketologists listed the team among the last four teams in the field.
“I’ll make it clear to you: We should be in the tournament,” Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim told reporters after Thursday’s game.
Other teams on the bubble include Drake, which started the season 18-0 and ended up losing to Loyola Chicago in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament final, as well as St. Louis and several Mountain West Conference teams: Utah State, Boise State and Colorado State.
Forget about some blue bloods this year.
Don’t be surprised when Duke and Kentucky are missing from your bracket.
The two programs have combined to win three championships since 2010, but for the first time since 1976, when the field had only 32 teams, neither will be in the field this year.
Kentucky’s season came to a merciful end on Thursday when the Wildcats lost to Mississippi State in the SEC tournament. Kentucky has now missed the tournament three times since leaving as a result of N.C.A.A. penalties in the 1992 season.
“My teams historically played like if they lost, they were going to the electric chair,” Wildcats Coach John Calipari said upon his team’s 9-16 finish. “This team did not.”
The Kentucky loss came about two hours after Duke had announced that its season was over after a member of the program tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday night.
Some new faces will be in the field.
The last time Rutgers was in the N.C.A.A. tournament was in 1991, when Mariah Carey was topping the Billboard pop charts and Geo Baker had not been born.
Baker, a 6-foot-4 senior guard from Derry, N.H., appears to have led the Scarlet Knights into their first men’s N.C.A.A. tournament in 30 years. Coach Steve Pikiell’s team would have made the field a year ago but was heartbroken when the tournament was canceled because of the pandemic.
“My whole life I’ve kind of been underrated, and I think that Rutgers is underrated right now,” Baker told the Big Ten Network. “And I love to prove people wrong, and I think that’s what we’re going to do here.”
Among other fresh faces in the tournament will be the Ohio Valley Conference program Morehead State, which is making its first appearance since knocking off Louisville in 2011 as a No. 13 seed; the Sun Belt Conference’s Appalachian State, making its third appearance over all and its first since 2000; the Southern Conference’s U.N.C. Greensboro, back for the first time since 2018; and, from the Mid-Atlantic Athletic Conference, Mount St. Mary’s, returning for the first time since 2017.
Watch out for Cade and the Cowboys.
If your favorite team has Oklahoma State in its bracket, it has a problem.
The Cowboys feature the 6-foot-8 freshman guard Cade Cunningham, the projected No. 1 pick in the N.B.A. draft, and notched six wins over ranked opponents in 19 days after beating No. 2 Baylor in a Big 12 tournament semifinal on Friday.
The Cowboys were initially given a postseason ban after an F.B.I. bribery and corruption investigation implicated one of the team’s assistant coaches. But the case is being appealed, and Cunningham has a legitimate shot to lead the Cowboys to the Final Four.
“I don’t think anybody expected us to be at this point right now,” Cunningham said in an on-air ESPN interview during the Big 12 tournament. He added: “We’re going to try to make the most of this opportunity. We’re allowed to play.”
