Iowa star Caitlin Clark has helped drive a surge in curiosity in ladies’s faculty basketball this season. Look for her Hawkeyes squad to land a 1-seed within the ladies’s match.

Matthew Holst/Getty Images

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Iowa star Caitlin Clark has helped drive a surge in curiosity in ladies’s faculty basketball this season. Look for her Hawkeyes squad to land a 1-seed within the ladies’s match.

Matthew Holst/Getty Images

It’s probably the most fantastic time of the 12 months: Will Caitlin Clark finish her historic faculty profession with a hoop? Will Cinderella put on a 10-gallon cowboy hat? Can Purdue keep away from one other embarrassing early exit?

The brackets for the lads’s and ladies’s NCAA Division I faculty basketball tournaments might be unveiled Sunday. The males’s bracket might be revealed first on CBS at 6 p.m. ET, adopted shortly after by the ladies’s bracket on ESPN.

Then, we’re underway. The males’s match suggestions off on Tuesday, March 19, and the primary full day of video games might be Thursday, March 21. The ladies’s first video games happen on Wednesday, March 20, and the complete spherical of 64 will start on Friday, March 22. The championship video games will happen on April 7 (ladies’s) and April 8 (males’s).

Here are some things to observe for on Selection Sunday and past because the tournaments begins subsequent week:

Can Caitlin Clark win a title in her final 12 months?

Look, it is Caitlin Clark’s world. Clark is the largest star in your complete sport — man or girl — and having introduced she intends to go professional after this season, this might be her ultimate crack on the NCAA match.

Her Iowa Hawkeyes will seemingly land a high seed. But they will not be the favorites: Undefeated South Carolina, led by legendary coach Dawn Staley, will nonetheless be high canine.

Last 12 months, Iowa and then-undefeated South Carolina met within the Final Four, and the 77-73 showdown was an instantaneous traditional wherein Clark scored 41 factors en path to handing the Gamecocks their solely lack of the season. But a tough comedown value Iowa the title sport. Clark and the Hawkeyes got here out flat in opposition to a scorching Louisiana State staff led by Angel Reese, who cruised to a 102-85 win and a championship ring. LSU and Reese might be again, too. [eyes emoji]

As the bracket is unveiled, be careful for these rematches, which might you’ll want to draw huge audiences.

It’s arduous to overstate what Clark has finished for the ladies’s sport. She handed the document set by Pistol Pete Maravich in 1970 to grow to be the all-time leading scorer in NCAA history. Ratings for girls’s faculty basketball are up 60% throughout all nationwide networks, they usually’ve topped rankings for the lads’s sport on FOX, according to the network’s analytics chief. Last weekend, as Clark led Iowa to a comeback victory within the Big Ten championship sport, the viewers averaged greater than 3 million viewers, peaking in additional time at almost 4.5 million. That’s not simply respectable; that is higher than almost each males’s sport but this season.

The ultimate 1-seed within the males’s match should still be up for grabs

Three of the 4 high seeds within the males’s match appear locked down by Houston, Connecticut and Purdue. But who will nab that ultimate spot?

The early cash had been on Tennessee, a program that has by no means reached the Final Four nor earned a 1-seed regardless of 25 match appearances. But the Volunteers faltered final weekend at house in opposition to the Kentucky Wildcats, then dropped a complete dud within the opening spherical of the SEC Tournament on Friday, falling 73-56 in opposition to bubble staff Mississippi State.

That has opened the door for North Carolina, a perennial powerhouse and six-time champion. The 26-6 Tar Heels have misplaced just one sport by double digits, regardless of a bruising non-conference schedule. If they win this weekend’s ACC Tournament, they’re seemingly a lock. But in the event that they fall out early, they may lose their shot to a robust exhibiting on Saturday by Iowa State.

The ultimate 1-seed will be part of some common suspects within the Connecticut Huskies, the returning champions hoping to grow to be the primary staff to go back-to-back since 2007, and the Houston Cougars, the seemingly high general seed who hasn’t misplaced since early February. As for the Purdue Boilermakers, each match nowadays appears to be a wrestle. After dropping of their first matchup final 12 months to 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson — solely the second 1-seed to ever lose to a 16-seed — Purdue followers could also be relieved to win a single sport.

Heavyweight Houston, seemingly the highest general seed, defeated the Stetson Hatters and their main scorer Jalen Blackmon again in November. Now, the Hatters have secured their first-ever berth within the males’s NCAA match.

David J. Phillip/AP

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David J. Phillip/AP

Heavyweight Houston, seemingly the highest general seed, defeated the Stetson Hatters and their main scorer Jalen Blackmon again in November. Now, the Hatters have secured their first-ever berth within the males’s NCAA match.

David J. Phillip/AP

Put in your cowboy hat and root for Stetson

Let your longshot Cinderella decide for the lads’s match be Stetson, the tiny Florida faculty that can seem within the match this 12 months for the primary time ever. (Their mascot is the Hatters! As within the cowboy hats! Yes, that Stetson!)

The Hatters are prone to be a 16-seed, that means they will must knock out a 1-seed so as to advance. That’s a tall order, sure, however one which now not feels inconceivable now that it is occurred twice earlier than. (They might additionally wind up in a play-in sport in opposition to one other 16-seed so as to earn the possibility to play a high seed.)

Still, this is why Stetson simply may need a preventing likelihood: The Hatters are led by one in every of faculty basketball’s high scorers in 6’3″ guard Jalen Blackmon. Blackmon has averaged more than 21 points this season and scored 43 (!) points, his highest total of the year, in last week’s Atlantic Sun conference championship final against Austin Peay, a 94-91 thriller.

Blackmon may enter the tournament having scored more this season than any other player in the country second only to one (the very dominant and very tall man at Purdue, Zach Edey). Sometimes the fairy dust hits guys like this at just the right time — and even Goliath can be toppled when David has a hot hand.

Other could-be Cinderellas to keep your eye on: Watch out for the Drake Bulldogs (a perennial mid-major darling back for another shot after a disappointing first-round ouster last year), the Grand Canyon Lopes (coached by one-time Cinderella himself Bryce Drew, whose Valparaiso squad toppled Ole Miss in 1998) and the James Madison Dukes (31 wins, including an opening night stunner against then-No. 4 Michigan State; who can say they can’t do it again?).

Get able to say farewell to the present lineup of conferences

The Pac-12, what was as soon as a storied convention, might be no extra subsequent season. No program has ever come near absolutely the dominance of John Wooden’s UCLA squads (10 championships, a run of 10 straight Final Fours), and three-time champion Stanford has been a modern-day heavyweight within the ladies’s sport.

But this 12 months’s basketball tournaments mark the top for the convention as we all know it. Next 12 months, Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington will be part of the Big Ten; Cal and Stanford will be part of the ACC; and Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah will be part of the Big 12. (The two remaining groups, Oregon State and Washington State, nonetheless hope to rebuild a brand new Pac-12. “We will fight it out,” Oregon State’s president told NPR last fall.)

The Pac-12 is simply the newest casualty of how faculty soccer continues to drive a reshaping of school athletics. The period of the regional convention is over, and the period of the super-conference might quickly start.

And there’s an ever-looming menace that the brand new energy conferences might select to interrupt away from the NCAA so as to type their very own league. Doing so might devastate the NCAA tournaments, which draw their magic from the single-elimination format that pits big-time applications in opposition to little upstarts in do-or-die contests. It’s irreplaceable. Enjoy it whereas it lasts.