March Madness live updates: First Four scores and updates as the NCAA tournament tips off
Sixty-seven games spread across six arenas. Hundreds of players, coaches and officials scattered across a half-dozen hotels. And 68 teams, all isolated from each other every second of the day — except for those 40 minutes on the game clock.
“When you condense 14 sites into one and bring 68 teams together to play 67 games in three weeks, it’s a logistical challenge,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball. “But it’s an exciting one, and one that we’ve embraced.”
The men’s tournament, which starts Thursday, is usually staged in 14 cities across the country. Last year, the event was canceled altogether, dashing championship dreams and costing the NCAA and its member schools hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. This year it will be held entirely in and around Indianapolis — a carefully coordinated, highly scrutinized, 19-day affair at a time when coronavirus cases, while falling, are several times higher than they were when the tournament was scratched a year ago. It won’t be a strict “bubble,” per se, but organizers are calling the tournament a “controlled environment,” as they hope to limit exposure to the coronavirus and quash any possible outbreaks.
