The NCAA tournament rolls on with 16 first-round games on Friday, starting around lunchtime on the East Coast and continuing deep into the night. This is the second day of first-round play, and the tournament’s initial field of 68 teams will be down to 32 when the action on Friday comes to a close.
NCAA bracket 2017: Game times, live TV schedule, scores for Friday
At the NCAA tournament, it’s one of the busiest basketball days of the year.
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Two of the tournament’s four No. 1 seeds, North Carolina in the South and Kansas in the Midwest, will make their first appearances of the Big Dance on Friday. So will Duke, a No. 2 seed that narrowly missed a No. 1 after winning the ACC tournament last week in New York. And so will Louisville, another No. 2 that has a real Final Four shot.
There are some good games coming. I have my eye on No. 7 Dayton and No. 10 Wichita State, playing in the South region. The Shockers are a better team than their seed, by a long shot, and I think it’s more than likely they will beat Dayton. Either way, though, a game between two excellent mid-major programs in the NCAA tournament should be lots of fun. Programs of this similar stature don’t usually meet in the first round.
Friday’s games are at four of the tournament’s subregional host sites: Sacramento, Indianapolis, Greenville, and Tulsa. There are four games at each site, which makes for a cool day of basketball-watching if you’ve got a ticket to one. And if you don’t, you just get to skip around on your TV, which is pretty excellent, too.
Everyone who wins on Friday returns to the court on Sunday in the Round of 32, after Thursday’s first-round winners resume on Saturday. There’s a week off after that, with the Round of 32 winners meeting in various Sweet Sixteen games next weekend. The sites for each regional final: New York for the East, San Jose for the West, Memphis for the South, and Kansas City for the Midwest. The Final Four is in Glendale, Ariz., a week later.
SB Nation’s live bracket, maintained all tournament long, is here. Our printable bracket, which you can still fill out by hand, is here. That bracket will get a lot more clarity by the end of the night, and lots of brackets will be altogether ruined.
Friday’s full schedule is below (all times Eastern).
You can stream every game in the tournament on NCAA.com, and the TV destinations for each game are listed alongside them on this schedule.
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