The 2024 NCAA basketball tournament brackets are officially set

The GIST: Last night’s dramatic bracket reveal featured first-time dancers and perennial powerhouses aplenty, setting the stage for this week’s March Madness tip-off. It is time.

How it works: As discussed in yesterday’s Scroll, the 68-team women’s and men’s fields feature 32 automatic qualifiers who won their conference tournaments and 36 at-large bid recipients as decided by a 12-member selection committee.

• From there, teams were assigned seeds Nos. 1 through 16 and divided into four regions where they’ll battle it out in single-elimination play over the next three weeks.

• And if the math’s not mathing, both tourneys tip off their First Four action in the next 48 hours, where — you guessed it — four teams contend for spots in the official bracket. No pressure.

The top seeds: In the women’s bracket, No. 1 South Carolina unsurprisingly snagged the No. 1 overall seed after going undefeated for the second straight regular season. The other No. 1s? Caitlin Clark’s Iowa, who’ll be a top seed for the first time since 1992, JuJu Watkins’ USC, their first top billing since 1986, and Texas, No. 1 for the first time since 2004. Parity, is that you?

• On the men’s side, defending champs UConn nabbed the No. 1 overall seed after dominating their way through the Big East tournament, with Houston, Purdue, and blue blood UNC rounding out the rest of the No. 1s.