The Galloping Ghost
- Washington, DC
But they aren't in the bracket. No one makes you submit your bracket until Thursday when the real games start. You know the identity of the First Four winners when submitting your picks.
If the format changed to 128, you'd submit a 128 team bracket on Tuesday or whenever.
When they originally came up with this First Four concept, I was yelling that the sky was falling because this was going to kill bracket pools. I was wrong. Instead, it has just been totally ignored. The NCAA tournament is weaker for it, but not in some big, noticeable way. The bubble no longer maps onto the actual tournament in an exact way, and the comically arrogant and short-sighted failed experiment with the "Second/Third Round" naming convention for the first weekend has left coaching resumes on Wikipedia and elsewhere utterly indecipherable (yes, I realize I care about that at the 99.9% percentile of college basketball fans), but it is still fundamentally healthy because it is still the 64-team bracketed gambling event starting with the basketball orgy of the first weekend that makes it such a marketable property.
On the other hand, the media and fans spend an entire month (if not more) arguing who are and aren't the last 4 teams in the tournament. The biggest question after the bracket is released is why is this team in over that. There's is an entire cottage industry devoted to that single question.
Who the last 4 teams in the tournament are is the biggest discussion before and after the bracket is released (not the last 5-8). Even if you're not playing on that Thursday or Friday, you're still in the tournament and getting massive publicity.