NCAA will not release brackets for canceled basketball tournaments

This Sunday was supposed to be Selection Sunday, but we won’t be getting any brackets, not even hypothetical ones.

Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, said the NCAA would not release brackets for the shuttered men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.

“The important work of the basketball committees is to set up competitively-balanced brackets to determine national champions,” Gavitt wrote in a story for the NCAA’s website. “I don’t believe it’s responsible or fair to do that with incomplete seasons — especially for tournaments that unfortunately won’t be played. Therefore there will not be any NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball championship selection shows or tournament brackets released this year.”

Gavitt said many coaches and athletic directors told him they’d have liked to see brackets to recognize where teams would have been seeded in the tournaments.

But on Thursday of last week, every collegiate conference pulled the plug on the conference tournaments that were still in progress amid the coronavirus reaching a pandemic level and the NBA suspending its season.

That means the majority of conferences did not crown a postseason champion, which would in turn earn the winning team the automatic bid into March Madness. 

“All of us want something to fill the void we’re feeling,” Gavitt wrote. “However, anything less than a credible process is inconsistent with the tradition of the NCAA basketball championships. Brackets based on hypotheticals can’t substitute for a complete selection, seeding and bracketing process.”