The selection committee has completed their work and the brackets for the 2011 NCAA Tournament have been released. Ohio State takes the #1 overall seed in the tournament and will be in the East bracket. Kansas takes the #1 seed in the Southwest, Duke is a #1 in the West and Pittsburgh is the final #1 seed in the Southwest bracket.
Three locals will be dancing as well. Temple is a #7 seed in the West bracket and will face #10 seeded Penn State in the first round. Temple is one of three Atlantic 10 teams in the dance. There should be some pretty good trash talk around a lot of Philly area watercoolers on Monday morning about this game. As our pals at Black Shoes Diaries pointed out, these two schools are very familiar with one another and while Penn State has dominated Temple in football, the Owls have dominated the series in basketball.
Villanova is a #9 seed and gets to stay near home in the East bracket. They will take on CAA champs George Mason in the first round. Should Nova get past George Mason, they'll likely have a second round matchup with the tournament's #1 overall seed Ohio State. As expected, the Wildcats were among 11 Big East teams in the tournament.
This year, it's a 68 team tournament and will begin on Tuesday. Two games will pit #16 seeds against one another and the other two games will feature the "last four" at large teams playing one another.
You can find a full printable version of the bracket here. They'll be discussing the Temple/Penn St matchup over at Black Shoe Diaries, while Villanova fans are celebrating over at The Nova Blog.