For first time, NCAA to reveal top 16 men’s tournament seeds in February

Worried about whether Kentucky will be considered for a No. 1 seed?

You’ll no longer have to wait until Selection Sunday to see what the NCAA is thinking.

This season, for the first time ever, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Selection Committee will provide a progress report on the NCAA field.

The top four teams in each region will be identified as they stand on Feb. 11. The choices will be revealed that day during the NCAA March Madness Bracket Preview show at 12:30 p.m. on CBS.

In previous years, media “bracketologists” have served fans their best guesses at how the seeding could play out during the lead-up to Selection Sunday. This is the first time we’ll hear from the group officially making the selections in advance of the final bracket reveal.

Leading off the CBS show, the bracket with the committee’s top 16 seeds as of Feb. 11 will be revealed. NCAA men’s basketball chair Mark Hollis, along with host Greg Gumbel and analysts Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis, will discuss the selection and seeding process as well as the reasoning behind the committee’s first-ever in-season bracket preview.

Bracketologist Jerry Palm also will join Gumbel, Kellogg and Davis later in the show to project the entire 68-team bracket, analyze the field, discuss bubble teams and highlight key story lines heading into March.

“We are excited about giving the fans a glimpse to what the men’s basketball committee is thinking at this point of the season, and creating a buzz as we look toward Selection Sunday,” Hollis said. “It’s important to recognize after this list has been released, there is still a significant portion of the regular season to be played and every league must stage its conference tournament. There’s potential for quite a bit of movement until we do it for real March 12, but this early peek will give everyone insight as to where the committee stands as we hit the stretch run of the regular season.”

Twenty-nine days after the committee’s bracket preview, the official NCAA Tournament field of 68 will be announced on March 12.

Fan reaction

The NCAA’s announcement Tuesday morning was met mostly with derision on Twitter. Here’s a sample of what fans had to say about the NCAA Tournament progress report:

This story was originally published January 24, 2017 at 10:49 AM with the headline "For first time, NCAA to reveal top 16 men’s tournament seeds in February."