For some fans across the country, Selection Sunday will be a stressful day as they wait to find out if their team has earned a bid to the NCAA Tournament. However, unlike the folks in Austin, Texas; Boise, Idaho; Bloomington, Indiana; and San Diego, California, the good people of West Texas don't have to worry about whether or not their team will be dancing next week. That's because we know that the Texas Tech basketball team is in the clear when it comes to the field of 68.
This will be the second year in a row for Tech to be in the NCAA Tournament. That will make Grant McCasland the first Texas Tech head coach to get his team to the NCAA Tournament in his first two seasons with the program.
When Tech is announced as a tournament team this afternoon, it will be the 22nd time the Red Raiders have been in the NCAA Tournament field. And given that Tech is headed to its seventh tournament in the last nine years that the event has been held, we are certainly in the golden age of Texas Tech basketball.
It's a far cry from where the program was just about a decade ago. 2015 was the ninth year in a row that Tech failed to make the NCAA Tournament as the program languished under the guidance of Pat Knight from 2008-2011 and then hit rock bottom during the short but disastrous Billy Gillespie era, which lasted only one full season, 2011-12.
Since 2016, though, NCAA appearances have become the expectation at Texas Tech. In that span, Tech has been forced to cycle through four different head coaches (Tubby Smith, Chris Beard, Mark Adams, and McCasland) and yet, it has remained an NCAA Tournament mainstay.
Prior to the current ten-season stretch, Tech's best era of tournament success came from 2002-07, when the program made the tournament in four out of six seasons. Of course, that was during the Bob Knight era.
Outside of Knight and McCasland, the only other Texas Tech head coaches to take the program to the NCAA Tournament multiple times are Beard, James Dickey, Gerald Myers, and Polk Robinson. Hopefully, McCasland will be in Lubbock for the long run, and this will be an annual tradition for the program under his guidance.
Certainly, Texas Tech fans will be tuning in today to see what seed McCasland and Co. have earned and what their path to glory will be. So here's how everyone can catch the March Madness selection show.
How Texas Tech fans can watch the NCAA Tournament Selection show
The men's tournament bracket will be revealed at 6 p.m. ET on CBS.