Men’s basketball is headed back to March Madness

By Jalen Robinson

The Nevada men’s basketball team is back to the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament for the first time since 2018. Despite a rocky end to the season, losing their last three games including their Mountain West conference quarterfinal game against the San Jose State Spartans, the Wolf Pack squeaked into the tournament for the very last at-large bid.

The Wolf Pack qualified for an at-large bid and are slated to play the Arizona State Sun Devils on Wednesday, March 15 in Dayton, Ohio in the NCAA March Madness “First Four” round. What is an at-large bid? There are two forms of bids to get into March Madness, an at-large bid and an automatic bid.

An automatic bid is given to teams who are the champions of their conference tournament, having the best record and winning the regular season conference title does not qualify as a bid. An at-large bid stands for all the teams that didn’t win their conference tournament but whose resumes stand out, making them eligible for selection by the NCAA tournament committee. The committee looks at overall statistics, wins, losses, and strength of schedule when considering who should be an at-large bid.

Since the Pack was one of the last teams to qualify they will, unfortunately, have to play an extra game in the first four before the tournaments start Thursday. The Pack will not be admitted into the March Madness bracket officially until then.

What are the “First Four”? To keep it simple, the First Four is the first round and the remaining 64 rounds. Consisting of eight teams, the First Four are simply the four lowest-seeded automatic qualifying teams and the four lowest-seeded at-large bid teams in the tournament. Each at-large or automatic bid team will be slotted to play one game against another first four team or their equivalent opponent to see who advances to play in the March Madness bracket. This is done to even the playing field of teams who both have very impressive resumes but both compare to one another relatively the same.

Once that game is played, the winner will take over the seed that they are fighting for. In this case, Nevada is battling Arizona State University for the eleventh seed. Thisseed will advance to Friday to face off against the six seed Texas Christian University.

Despite sitting pretty and gazing at March Madness in 2nd place with only five games left before the Mountain West conference tournament, the Pack stumbled to the finish line. Almost giving up their spot to another at-large bid, the Pack dropped four of their last six games while losing three straight to end the season, two of them being overtime losses.

Even though the Pack’s rough patch came at the worst time of the year and much hope was lost for an at-large bid, the Pack still managed to finish thirty-seventh in the national rankings. This would later have them blessed by the selection committee, granting the Pack the last at-large bid available in the bracket. The decision by the committee left out the Oklahoma State Cowboys of the Big 12, being the first team out. With that said, Wolf Pack March Madness basketball is back like it never left. The Pack looks to make a statement in their first NCAA tournament game since the Eric Musselman era in 2018. Nevada will play on Wednesday, March, 15th at 6:10 Pacific Time on TruTV,