The First Four offers small schools an NCAA Tournament win and a rare-among-rare home court game in the Big Dance.
The NCAA Tournament starts tonight with the First Four in Dayton, an annual rite of passage that serves in a vacuum as an entertaining two-night slate of games and serves in context as a scrumptious appetizer and mental warm-up for the heart of the tournament that starts Thursday and runs through Sunday.
The tournament's first weekend is unlike any other event in American sports, and to properly enjoy it, one must know who is playing when, what games should take priority (at least until last-second shots supersede interesting-on-paper match-ups) and which games feed into which possible scenarios later in the tournament so the process may begin again.
Tonight, the First Four kicks off with a pair of No. 16 seeds whose winning prize is a game Thursday against Kentucky. Hampton and Manhattan play at 6:40 p.m. ET on truTV. Later that night is the first at-large game in the First Four between Nos. 11 BYU and Ole Miss at 9:40 p.m. ET, also on truTV. The winner of that game feeds into the West Region and a round-of-64 match-up with No. 6 Xavier.
The First Four wraps up Sunday with another 16-seed face-off between Robert Morris and North Florida (winner plays Duke) and a unique scenario in which Dayton will play in the NCAA Tournament on its home floor. The University of Dayton has hosted the First Four and its predecessor, the single play-in game, since its first edition in 2001, and for the first time, the Flyers are among those playing to get in to the field of 64. Dayton was chosen to host the event in part because of how the community has embraced it, and the Flyers' being among the First Four could raise the first four games of the tournament to a status near equal the other 63.
Once the rest of the field begins play Thursday is when the fun begins in full. The tournament's top seed, Kentucky, will play the late game Thursday on CBS. No. 8 Cincinnati and No. 9 Purdue play at 7:27 p.m. ET on CBS, and Kentucky will tip off against either Manhattan or Hampton after that game—probably some time around 10 p.m. ET.
The day kicks off at 12:15 p.m. ET in the Midwest Region with No. 3 Notre Dame and No. 14 Northeastern. It serves as an appropriate starting point because Jerian Grant, Notre Dame's star and the ACC Tournament most valuable player, could well be one of the tournament's most electric players.
Iowa State, Baylor and Arizona also play in the first barrage of games Thursday afternoon.
Villanova, the top seed in the East region, plays Thursday at 6:50 p.m. ET in the first game of the evening session against No. 16 Lafayette on TBS. The other No. 1 seeds, Duke and Wisconsin, play in the evening session Friday.
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