Before the NCAA tournament can wreak havoc on your bracket, Selection Sunday is when we all learn each team’s potential path to a national championship.
March Madness always ends with the One Shining Moment montage, but it officially begins on Selection Sunday.
Teams who win their respective conference tournaments already know with 100 percent certainty that they will be in the NCAA Tournament. Most of the at-large selections also know with about 99.9 percent certainty that they’ll make the cut, too.
For more than a handful of teams on the proverbial bubble, though, Selection Sunday is Judgment Day. And for all 68 teams that make the cut, it’s when they find out what path — both geographically and in terms of prospective opponents — lies between them and the dream of cutting down the nets.
It’s a big day in college hoops.
And if you’re looking for more information on that big day, we’ve got you covered.
Disclaimer: Our focus here is on the Division I men’s NCAA tournament. There are other D-I men’s tournaments, along with D-II, D-III and NAIA tournaments. "March Madness" also applies to the women’s D-I NCAA tournament. But the Big Kahuna that everyone fills out a bracket for is the D-I men’s NCAA tournament.
What Is Selection Sunday in March Madness?
Selection Sunday is the glorious time of the year when the bracket for the NCAA tournament is revealed; the ceremonial transition from the end of the season to the beginning of March Madness.
Bracketologists, a la Joe Lunardi, do their best to project what the field will look like, using résumé data from the current season and knowledge of previous selection committees’ tendencies to forecast what the bracket might look like. But it isn’t until Selection Sunday that we truly know anything.
During the selection show, the 68-team field is revealed, line by line, typically beginning with whichever of the four regions (East, Midwest, South or West) houses the No. 1 overall seed.
Teams (and fans of those teams) find out during the show:
- If they made the tournament at all (if not an automatic bid)
- Who their first round opponent will be
- Possible draw for all subsequent rounds
- Where their games will be played
Information about the specific tip-off times and channels for the 32 first-round games on Thursday and Friday typically comes later in the evening, as the decision makers at CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery try to figure out the most compelling (er, profitable) way to arrange those time slots.
For more information on the selection process and March Madness in general, we also have this guide.
When Is Selection Sunday?
As you may have guessed, it’s on a Sunday.
More specifically, it’s always on a Sunday in mid-March, taking place in the vicinity of March 11-17 in each year dating back to 2003. (Except for 2020, when there was no NCAA tournament due to COVID lockdown. We don’t talk about that depressing time, but Selection Sunday was scheduled for March 15 that year.)
In 2025, Selection Sunday will be on Sunday, March 16.
Where Can You Watch Selection Sunday?
CBS is the primary option for watching the men’s selection show.
You can also stream it on Paramount+.
Or, if neither of those is an option, you could always just be hanging out on social media around that time. If you follow anyone in the college basketball national media, screenshots of the bracket are all but guaranteed to flood your feed that night.
What Time Does the Selection Show Start?
The selection show begins promptly at 6 p.m. ET. Though, after all the introductory fluff, it’s usually not until around 6:07 that they start giving us what we want.
Oftentimes, the last of the conference championship games runs right up against that window, too. The Big Ten title game traditionally tips off at 3:30 p.m. ET, and the American Athletic Conference championship game usually begins at 3:15.
Why they insist upon doing so, we’ll never know. In both 2015 and 2021, the Big Ten championship game (notably airing on CBS) went into overtime, darn near causing the start of the selection show to be delayed.
The unveiling of the bracket is unnecessarily drawn out, yet seems to happen in an instant. After weeks, nay, months of waiting and hoping and projecting who could land where, the entire bracket is revealed, region by region, in the span of about 30 minutes.
NCAA Tournament Dates for 2025
The Selection Show is merely the first step in crowning a national champion. There are 67 games to be played over the course of three weeks, in the following format:
- Selection Sunday
- Sunday, March 16
- First Four
- Four games played between the last four at-large teams and the four worst automatic qualifiers, typically No. 11 seeds and No. 16 seeds.
- Tuesday/Wednesday, March 18-19, in Dayton, Ohio
- First Round
- The wall-to-wall madness of 16 games on Thursday and 16 games on Friday when no one in Corporate America accomplishes anything because they’re too busy watching hoops.
- Thursday/Friday, March 20-21, in eight predetermined locations. [In 2025, those locations are: Cleveland, Denver, Lexington, Milwaukee, Providence, Raleigh, Seattle and Wichita.]
- Second Round
- Eight games on Saturday and eight games on Sunday, the winners advancing to the Sweet 16.
- Saturday/Sunday, March 22-23, in the same locations as the First Round.
- Sweet 16
- After a brief hiatus for everyone to catch their breath and venture to the second-weekend sites, the madness resumes with four games on each day.
- Thursday/Friday, March 27-28, in four predetermined locations. [In 2025, those locations are: Atlanta, Indianapolis, Newark and San Francisco.]
- Elite Eight
- Four more games to determine who advances to the Final Four.
- Saturday/Sunday, March 29-30, in the same locations as the Sweet 16.
- Final Four
- The national semifinals, and the only true Final Four, though basically every other sport now tries to use that moniker.
- Saturday, April 5, in San Antonio, TX in 2025.
- National Championship
- For all the glory.
- Monday, April 7, in San Antonio, TX.
How Selection Sunday Impacts Your Bracket and/or DFS Plans
It’s all about the matchups.
You might feel really strongly about a particular player or team heading into Selection Sunday, but then fall out of love completely because of the draw they were given by the selection committee.
Conversely, the matchups might lead you to stumble upon an absolute gem of an upset pick or a budget play for DFS.
Like Oakland and Jack Gohlke in the 2024 NCAA tournament, for instance. That’s when the nation’s leader in made three-pointers got placed against a Kentucky team that notoriously did not play much perimeter defense. Gohlke hit 10 triples, the Golden Grizzlies pulled off the 14-over-3 stunner and a minimal amount of research could've clued you in to the possibility that would happen.
Betting lines are available almost the instant the matchups are announced, but those are just about entirely derived from what each team accomplished over the course of the season from an efficiency standpoint and don’t take the actual matchups into consideration. Doing so is where you can find an edge.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many teams get chosen on Selection Sunday?
With the Pac-12 no longer in the picture, there are 31 automatic bids for the winners of the conference tournaments and 37 at-large bids that the selection committee spends countless hours debating and deliberating about.
How does the committee decide who gets what seed and where they play?
Joe Lunardi wrote an entire book on the subject of Bracketology, but the TL;DR answer is that teams get rewarded seeding based on the quality of their wins and losses prior to Selection Sunday, and the ‘where’ part frankly just falls into place based on overall seeding, proximity to the various venues and bracketing principles that attempt to avoid too many rematches of regular-season games.
For instance, as the No. 1 overall seed of the 2024 NCAA tournament, Connecticut was awarded first and second round games in Brooklyn (the nearest of the eight pods for that year’s dance), and was also placed in the East Region with Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games held in Boston that year.
Where is the Final Four in (insert year) and how are future Final Four sites chosen?
Addressing the latter part first, there’s a whole bidding process, similar to when cities wish to host the Olympics or the World Cup. Venue capacity, hotel accommodations, accessibility and all sorts of factors go into the decision, and then the Final Four sites are announced years in advance.
The 2025 NCAA tournament with its Final Four in San Antonio hasn’t even begun, yet we already know where the Final Four will take place for the next few years:
- Indianapolis in 2026
- Detroit in 2027
- Las Vegas in 2028
- Indianapolis in 2029
- North Texas/Arlington in 2030
- Atlanta in 2031
Sites for the first two weekends of the tournament don’t get planned quite that far out, but we already know all of the hosts for the 2026, 2027 and 2028 NCAA tournaments.
Track March Madness Picks and Win Your Fantasy League with Sleeper
When Selection Sunday rolls around in mid-March and you’re searching for the best place to host your bracket pool, look no further than Sleeper’s Bracket Mania.
You can have up to 10,000 participants in your bracket pool, or make it private and just keep it to a small group of friends. Either way, you can see throughout the tournament where your bracket ranks globally.
Shortly after the field is revealed, you’ll get to read little blurbs about each of the teams in the tournament, in case you need any stats, help or just the occasional chuckle while filling out your bracket.
Once the tournament has begun and entries are locked in, Sleeper takes care of marking all those winners and losers while you use the in-app chat for bragging rights and/or sob stories about where it all went wrong.
Of course, March Madness only encompasses a small fraction of the calendar, but Sleeper has you covered year-round with a multitude of fantasy offerings. If you can’t find something on there that you would enjoy as a sports fan, you probably didn’t look very hard.
