March Madness: Selection Sunday 2016, NCAA Men's Tourney Preview

Which teams are about to snag a ticket to college basketball’s big dance, the 2016 NCAA Tournament?

You can watch as NCAA officials announce who keeps playing in March Madness when Selection Sunday picks are broadcast March 13 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. ET on CBS and NCAA.com.

From its humble start in 1939 with only eight teams, the tourney has grown to a national obsession over 68 teams battling their way through the brackets to the top of the heap.

Former player and NBA analyst Charles Barkley offered his March Madness prediction Monday night on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

Barkley says there is no one favorite, no Goliath to be defeated.

“There’s a bunch of Davids. There’s probably 25 teams that can get to the Final Four and 10 teams that can actually win the tournament,” Barkley told the host. “This is going to be the most fun tournament. There’s no favorite … this is the most wide open it’s ever been.”

Favorites are booted by upstarts every year – it’s just a question of calling which upsets will happen that lets you win the office pool.

This year’s likely No. 1 seeds are Villanova, Virginia, Kansas and North Carolina, says Bleacher Report and ESPN’s Bracketology blog.

First-round games kick off March 15, and play continues throughout the month. The Final Four games will be held April 2 and 4 at NRG Stadium in Houston.

How Sport Grew Into March Madness

For decades Americans largely ignored their homegrown game, in part, says one sports writer, because the NCAA tournament was roughly two dozen teams by the 1960s, with John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins winning 10 titles starting in 1964. Once the fabled coach retired in 1975, and the NCAA expanded the bracket to 32 teams, fans – and occasional fans – began to pay attention.

Credit for the first NCAA bracket pool goes to a Staten Island bar in 1977, says Smithsonian magazine.

But the clincher that drew millions of new watchers to March Madness was the 1979 NCAA final, a historic matchup between future NBA Hall-of-Famers Magic Johnson playing for Michigan State against Larry Byrd’s Indiana State.

"They were the focus of national attention, and soon became very hot rivals in the NBA, but that game was a turning point for the NCAAs. That game had a lot of national interest," says Ken Rappoport, co-author of The Big Dance: The Story of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. "The NCAA, for many years before that, went through a lot of these tournaments without any TV coverage.”

That morphed into a multi-billion-dollar sport with the 1989 upset of No. 1 Georgetown by No. 16 seed Princeton. From that game on, bracket-busters were the talk of the country every March, destroying betting odds and office pools nationwide.

The current contract between CBS and Turner to televise some of the tournament games is worth $10.8 billion over 14 years, reports Sports Illustrated.

CBS Sports and Turner Sports will provide live coverage of all games from the 2016 NCAA tournament across four national television networks: TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV – with all games streamed on NCAA March Madness Live.

And for the first time in the tourney’s 78-year history, TBS will broadcast the national championship on Monday, April 4, rather than a traditional network carrying the game.