Let's ride. It's time to get on the highway to Arlington, Tex., as the path to the Final Four is made plain for 68 teams. What are the 10 biggest stories to emerge from Selection Sunday — selection, seeding, bracketing, the regions, the matchups, everything under the sun? The envelope, please: 10 – THE BUBBLE […]

The bubble situation is set in stone — it all depends on what the selection committee has decided to do. The selection of at-large teams is likely a past-tense event. Sunday’s various conference tournament finals do not involve bubble teams or unexpected automatic bids. The selection drama is naturally the biggest part of Selection Sunday, […]

Selecting and bracketing the 68 teams for the NCAA tournament are immensely important responsibilities. Getting the 68 teams right, protecting the top 16 seeds (four in each region), and not giving undue advantages to lower seeds are the three main tasks of the selection committee each year… within the given bracketing rules, of course (rules […]

There are some new bracket rules in place for the 2014 NCAA Tournament. Diehard college basketball fans are aware of these changes, but if you haven't had the time or space to do your own research, here's a chance to get caught up to speed. All the semifinals in the big conference tournaments are done. […]

Friday was a near-perfect day for Bubble Nation. Almost every result improved the odds (or at the very least, did not reduce the odds) that teams such as Nebraska, BYU, California, Tennessee will make their way into the field of 68. None of those teams are locks — that's not what a lock is — […]

You know it's March.  Daytime weekday basketball is being played. Joe Lunardi is a constant presence on ESPN. You're wondering which teams to root for so that your school, squarely on the bubble, can sneak into the 2014 NCAA Tournament. Situationally convenient cheering — any sports fan has to do it at some point, but […]

The calendar says that today is March 13, but in many ways and for many people, the arrival of daytime power conference tournament basketball marks the beginning of what casual sports fans regard as "The Madness." It didn't take long for fans to go crazy, and for brackets to get busted. In the first window […]

It happens every spring… well, make that the final week before every spring officially begins. Coaches who haven't been able to break through in multiple years on the job enter a conference tournament needing at least one win if not more to nail down an elusive Dance invitation. The man in the photo above, Cuonzo […]

This is not one of the better Gonzaga teams in the program's history, and more specifically, in its two-decade run of excellence that began in the mid-1990s. This is not a Bulldog team with waves of big bodies or that one stud in the low post (Kelly Olynyk) that can take over a game in […]

For Championship Week, let’s quickly point out that the hard choices a viewer has to make are confined to three days rather than all seven. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, the small conference tournaments host their semifinals and title games while the big conferences gear up for their shindigs later in the week. […]

Championship Week – in essence, a fortnight – is now reduced to an actual seven-day period, one of the best of the sports year.   Plenty of American sports fans regard the first weekend of the NCAA tournament as the high point on the sports calendar in this country, and there’s a strong argument to […]