Charles Barkley, Dick Vitale give the NCAA Tournament First Four some needed star power

The Athletic has live coverage of the 2026 Men’s March Madness first round. 

“CAPITAL-A AWESOME, BABY!”

“That’s turrible.”

When the defining voice of college basketball joins the defining voice of the NBA tonight to call one of the least consequential games of March Madness, the NCAA Tournament’s First Four gets a jolt of TV star power that would be worth tuning in for, regardless of the matchup.

Dick Vitale and Charles Barkley — equally inimitable and iconic sports TV talents — will pair up for the back half of Tuesday’s “First Four” doubleheader, a matchup between fringe NCAA Tournament teams Texas and NC State. The 11-seeds will play for the right to advance to Thursday’s West region first-round game versus 6-seed BYU.

The Vitale-Barkley game is scheduled to tip off at 9:15 p.m. ET from Dayton, Ohio, on truTV (more on that in a sec). Play-by-play announcer Brian Anderson will take on the challenge of staying out of the way, and Jenny Dell will be the game’s sideline reporter.

For fans, it is a unique treat, enlivening a part of the NCAA Tournament many fans still ignore or resent — there is no option (or timing) to include First Four predictions in your bracket picks, although if a team plays well in the First Four, you might consider adjusting your picks before Thursday’s noon ET bracket deadline. (Warning: Most First Four winners lose their next game!)

But the opportunity to watch Vitale and Barkley on the air together is like Superman and Spider-Man in a movie together, Picasso and Monet painting a mural, the “Wire/Sopranos” crossover event — the kind of team-up that fans dream about. It became a reality when ESPN licensed the rights to Turner Sports’ “Inside the NBA,” bringing Barkley into the ESPN Cinematic Universe.

The network experimented with pairing the two for an Indiana-Kentucky game on ESPN back in December, but the date circled on the calendar has always been having them on the air together in mid-March. Incredibly, this is Vitale’s first time calling an NCAA Tournament game for a U.S. TV audience. (Kudos to ESPN, CBS and Turner for playing nice and making this happen.)

Expect the positivity, camaraderie and energy to be off the charts (other than when Barkley — an Auburn basketball legend — gripes about the Tigers being left out of the field in favor of, say, SMU, which is playing in the First Four on Wednesday night.) That the matchup involves big brands like Texas and NC State is a bonus.

The First Four is a fascinating case study in messing with your product, adding a couple of at-large teams to the field, launching a bunch of early-week games no one really asked for and creating an off-balance awkwardness to the near-perfect geometry of the traditional bracket. The First Four has always had a weird dynamic: Half the participating teams are bounced before the tournament feels like it starts on Thursday. And many college hoops traditionalists continue to seem to resent the entire concept.

The First Four launched in 2011, creating extra slots for the bubbliest of bubble teams (pairing the “last four teams in” to earn their way into the first round) and extra 16-seeds, forced into an elimination game that takes a team with an automatic conference championship bid and boots them before the fun even starts. (In 2001, the NCAA created a single additional expansion 16-versus-16 game between the two lowest-ranked automatic qualifiers.)

Fifteen years in, the results of the First Four have been mixed, both competitively and in drawing audience attention on TV.

In that inaugural year of 2011, 11-seed VCU catapulted from the First Four to the Final Four, much to the chagrin of college basketball fans and analysts who hated the idea of tournament expansion. In 2021, 11-seed UCLA played in the First Four, using it as a springboard to its own Final Four run. Three other First Four teams have made it to the Sweet 16 (2013 LaSalle, 2014 Tennessee, 2018 Syracuse), but the majority of First Four winners earn their way into the “real” bracket, only to lose their very next game.

(Shout-out to Fairleigh Dickinson in 2023, who won its 16-versus-16 First Four game, then promptly knocked out 1-seed Purdue two days later.)

TV ratings have been mediocre — partly a function of fans not considering the games “real,” partly a function of CBS and Turner Sports insisting on airing them on a cable network, TruTV, that sports fans look up one week per year. (Jokes about the annual March tradition of Googling “how to find TruTV” never get old.)

But the First Four had a TV breakthrough last year — its highest-rated set of games ever. Last year’s Tuesday night showcase between UNC — a top-tier program that historically plays into and past the Sweet 16, not in the First Four — set a new single-game high of 2.2 million viewers. The next night, Texas topped Xavier in a thriller, which set a new record of 2.4 million viewers. The lesson: If you can put the biggest brands in the First Four slots, fans tune in. (I also think that curious fans will tune in Wednesday to see the fuss around the contentious 31-1 Miami (Ohio) team, when it plays the iffy-included SMU, the two teams that are the object of so much Auburn ire.)

This larger tension becomes a bigger issue as the NCAA moves closer to expanding the tournament by another four or eight teams in the next year or two. The classic, beloved 64-team format starting Thursday after Selection Sunday will remain the same; the First Four would get supersized to a First Eight or First 12 (catchy nickname suggestions welcome… the “Ehhh Eight?” The “Traditionalists-Hate-This 12?”), so these awkward early-week games aren’t going anywhere.

All the more reason to celebrate this pairing of “Dickie V” and “Sir Charles” — tuning in for the game will be entertaining, even if the basketball played on the floor is essentially inconsequential to your bracket picks.