The NCAA announced they were changing the location of the 13 preliminary sites for the 2021 March Madness Tournament. This decision came after the committee discussed the safety of conducting the championships spread throughout the country and deemed it would be very difficult to execute in the current pandemic.
What We Know:
- The NCAA was forced to cancel the March Madness tournament of 2020 due to the rapid spreading of COVID-19, especially with the pending shutdown of the country at the time. The men’s Division I championship had been played every year since 1939. It’s one of the largest basketball tournaments to be played early in the year. March Madness is normally staged at 13 arenas across America. Not including the play-in games in Dayton, Ohio, there are normally eight sites for the first and second round contest, four for third and fourth round play, and then a single venue for the national semifinals and final, according to NBC News.
- Mitch Barnhart, chairman of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee and the athletic director at the University of Kentucky, said the NCAA studied other sports that have held playoffs during the pandemic before coming to the conclusion that a normal March Madness wouldn’t be possible in 2021.
- The committee has decided the championship should be held in a single area to increase the safety and well-being of the event and their crowd. Indianapolis was previously scheduled to host the men’s basketball Final Four in the same year of 2021.
- “Through the pandemic, it was unreasonable to expect that,” Barnhart said. “Getting to one geographic location gave us the best opportunity to do that for the safety and health of the participants, officials, all of the workers.”
- The tournament will host 68 teams to compete this year. After Selection Sunday on March 14, the action continues through to the Final Four in Indianapolis on April 3 and 5.
CBS Sports and Turner Sports will continue to air all 67 games of the tournament across TBS, CBS, TNT, and truTV and their digital platforms.
