RELATED: Top 16 seeds revealed in first-ever in-season look at NCAA Tournament Bracket
What: NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Selection Committee will offer teams and fans an in-season look at the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship bracket by unveiling the current top 4 teams in each region.
Time: 12:30 pm ET; Saturday, February 11
TV: CBS
Bracket: Print out your 2017 March Madness bracket
Tournament Info: Schedule, times, key numbers for 2017 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament
The show: Leading off, the bracket with the Committee’s current top 16 seeds will be revealed. Committee Chairman 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.Noted bracketologist Jerry Palm also will join Gumbel, Kellogg and Davis later in the show to project out the entire 68 team bracket, analyze the field, discuss bubble teams and highlight key storylines heading into March.
MORE: 7 players you want with the ball in crunch time | AP Top 25 rankings
What to expect: What’s a weekend like last weekend, when six teams in the Associated Press top-10 lost in one day, say about the task at hand for the Committee?
“It says the committee better be doing their homework,” Hollis said. “It’s exciting on the one hand. On the other hand what it’s doing to the process is, it’s bunching together both the top of the bracket and the proverbial bubble. You have teams that are getting big wins and positioning themselves. The teams we thought were running away with it have been pulled back into the field, and the teams that maybe were out of it are being pulled back up into the field.
“It’s a compression of the entire bracket. The more compression there is, the more challenging it is for the committee.”
That challenge will get an unprecedented public airing Saturday when the committee releases what it currently views as the top four seeds in each region. They have gone through this process before behind closed doors, as a trial run for March. But this is very different. It is an idea promoted by the NABC – the coaches’ organization – and agreed to by the committee. Doing anything the first time can be a little dicey.
There's nothing like hearing your name called.#BracketPreview Saturday at 12:30 pm ET on @CBS. pic.twitter.com/Hs7yxrvkAq
— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) February 7, 2017
“Probably what concerns me the most is knowing the value that this week had to the committee in preparation,” Hollis said. “It’s going to be a different approach this year because we know what we walk out of here with is going to be public information.
“I was half tongue-in-cheek thinking of quoting a former basketball player Allen Iverson, saying it’s just practice. And that’s really all this is. What we need to insure is that what happens in February does not negatively impact what we do in March. That’s where our focus has to be." Read more here from our conversation with Mark Hollis about Saturday's reveal.
NCAA.com's Mike Lopresti contributed to this story.
