Members of the Drexel group rejoice throughout a sport in opposition to Stony Brook within the championship of the Colonial Athletic Association convention girls’s match, Sunday, March 17, 2024. Drexel gained and certified for the NCAA girls’s basketball match – and can now face No. 1 bracket seed Texas.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

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Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Members of the Drexel group rejoice throughout a sport in opposition to Stony Brook within the championship of the Colonial Athletic Association convention girls’s match, Sunday, March 17, 2024. Drexel gained and certified for the NCAA girls’s basketball match – and can now face No. 1 bracket seed Texas.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

It’s time to get these No. 2 pencils out, and brackets printed.

March Madness has arrived.

The official brackets for the boys’s and girls’s NCAA Division I faculty basketball tournaments have been revealed Sunday night, with the ultimate record of the 68 chosen groups displaying quite a lot of pleasure – and some surprises.

Whether you are one of many roughly 68 million Americans expected to put a guess on the match, otherwise you’re simply in search of a straightforward entryway into the March Madness dialog with some insider lingo (Cinderella, anybody?) – listed below are some highlights to concentrate to heading into Tuesday’s kickoff:

1. Top picks for males

The University of Connecticut Huskies are the defending champions who stay favored to win this 12 months’s match. This marks the sixth time the Huskies have achieved the No. 1 seed within the East Region. If they will pull off one other championship, they’re going to be the primary repeat win since Florida in 2007. Other high seeds embrace Houston, Purdue, and North Carolina.

Favorites apart, choice committee members stated this 12 months’s choice course of was probably the most difficult in years.

“It’s never been this hard for the committee,” David Worlock, the NCAA Director of Media Coordination, wrote on X. “Not only because of how close so many of these teams are, but because of the abundance of bid thieves which have knocked teams out.”

2. Increasing pleasure for the ladies’s match

Could this be the 12 months that speak across the girls’s NCAA match overtakes the boys’s? Some analysts say it is the extra fascinating of the 2 championships, anyway.

The rising buzz across the girls’s match is thanks partially to the fan frenzy surrounding Iowa’s Caitlin Clark. Earlier this month, the 22-year-old became the all-time main scorer in NCAA Division 1 basketball – males’s or girls’s.

But it isn’t nearly Clark, whose group bagged a No. 1 seed. Iowa faces a stiff competitors from inside its personal area, the place UCLA, Kansas State and LSU lurk. In reality, Iowa misplaced to LSU in final 12 months’s title sport.

And then there’s South Carolina, which is hoping to proceed its undefeated run by capturing its second title in three years. Only 9 girls’s groups have capped off an undefeated common seasons with a championship – and that feat has been achieved by only four universities.

3. Scoping out the “Cinderellas”

Who does not love an underdog success story? That’s what the so-called “Cinderellas” of the NCAA video games are all about. To discover the Cinderellas, specialists know to look no additional than the No. 12 vs. No. 5 seed face-offs. After all – there have been 53 upsets by 12-seeds since the match subject expanded in 1985.

One sport that analysts are eyeing from the boys’s first spherical is No. 5 Wisconsin vs. No. 12 James Madison. James Madison could possibly be a well-liked upset choose, with the Dukes (31-3) topping off the Sun Belt Conference Tournament with a 13-game win streak.

Another sizzling one is the No. 5 Gonzaga vs. No. 12 McNeese State, with some analysts predicting McNeese may upset and go all the way in which to the candy sixteen spherical.