March Madness 2015: Three things to know about NCAA tournament on Tuesday
1. FIRST FOUR FIRST: For a day or so, the focus shifts from the team in Lexington, Ky., to a collection of teams gathered 140 miles away in Dayton, Ohio. That's where UD Arena will add to its record number of NCAA tournament games hosted with the First Four.
Manhattan and Hampton are meeting tonight for the right to face top overall seed Kentucky, and BYU faces Mississippi in a game that will send the winner to Jacksonville to face Xavier on Thursday.
Should Manhattan win, Jaspers coach and recent Kentucky grad Steve Masiello will lead his team against his alma mater on Thursday in Louisville. That coincidence, if you call it that, is not lost on him. "The unfortunate thing is they love story lines, and they've done it for years," Masiello said of the selection committee laying the groundwork for a matchup with the Wildcats.
BYU bears watching if only to see an increasingly rare aspect of college basketball, the mid-range jumper. Arguably no one in the tournament is as practiced and effective with the mid-range than Cougars senior Tyler Haws.
2. ASSISTS: With First Four games imminent, it's not too early to fill out your bracket(s). First, print one. We've also identified favorites, sleepers and potential upsets in each region, the Midwest, West, East and South. And our college basketball experts Nicole Auerbach, Scott Gleeson, Shelby Mast and Eric Prisbell have already made their completed brackets public on our BracketHub.
Meanwhile, our friends from Prediction Machine ran 50,000 simulations of the bracket to determine the likely Cinderellas, sleepers and busts.
3. TAKING FLIGHT: Today the airways and highways will be populated by college basketball teams traveling to their game sites. Thanks to a change instituted this year, some teams might stick around their game sites longer than normal, even if they lose. What remains to be seen is if a nationwide shortage of charter planes brings on unprecedented travel issues for the 132 men's and women's Division I teams playing this week.
NCAA TOURNAMENT FIELD OF 68