INDIANAPOLIS, IN – APRIL 01: A 165-foot tall NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket is seen on the JW Marriott Indianapolis leading up to the 2015 Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 1, 2015 in Indianapolis, Indiana. The bracket is 44,000 square-feet. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

The NCAA Tournament is getting some of the regular season selection buildup that the College Football Playoff gets, as the NCAA announced that the NCAA Tournament selection committee will be holding a selection preview show on February 11 to break down the top 16 teams—the top four seed lines—at that time.

Ultimately, the show won’t mean much. A lot can happen in a month—for instance, Iowa was considered a top-two seed at that time last year and ended the year as a seven-seed—and it’s unlikely the top 16 will hold between the preview show and the selection show. Moreover, the biggest controversies on the Selection Sunday tend to revolve around bubble teams, not specific seed lines at the top of the bracket. No team in the top 16 on February 11 is in danger of missing out on the NCAA Tournament, so there really isn’t going to be much drama involved.

The only real drama will really be whether Kentucky or Kansas fans get to angrily tweet at the NCAA about their positioning, and that’s kind of the point.

While the NCAA has traditionally remained quiet about tournament seeding until selection day, an entire cottage industry of “Bracketology” has popped up, where major news outlets bring in huge traffic numbers by predicting what the NCAA Tournament field will look like. Now, the NCAA gets a piece of the fun (and the money that comes with a selection show) too:

Another plus for the NCAA: It will bring more attention to college basketball at a time when football is finally finished and the sporting scene isn’t so saturated. The NCAA Tournament is always one of the most-watched sporting events of the year, while college basketball regular season ratings are typically poor. There’s a stereotype that college basketball is only popular during the NCAA Tournament. This provides a chance for the sport to show that it has arrived on the national sports scene, and it sets up a fun sprint to the finish that could potentially attract more viewers and interest in the end of the regular season.

This isn’t a game-changer for the NCAA, but it comes in the same month as the association’s promise to include better advanced statistics in making selection decisions. That means the NCAA is modernizing how it views the entirety of the regular season and how it relates to NCAA Tournament selections. That’s a good thing for fans who want to improve the popularity of the sport.

About Kevin Trahan

Kevin mostly covers college football and college basketball, with an emphasis on NCAA issues and other legal issues in sports. He is also an incoming law student. He's written for SB Nation, USA Today, VICE Sports, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.