March Madness 2017: ESPN analyst Dick Vitale talks NCAA Tournament

March Madness has arrived, and ESPN college hoops analyst Dick Vitale spoke with FanSided about this year’s NCAA Tournament.

When the calendar flips from February to March, there are two things you can count on: some odd weather from Mother Nature and a lot of talk from legendary ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale.

Trying to avoid the weather anomalies, we opted to speak with Vitale about the 2017 NCAA Tournament the day after Selection Sunday, when the field for this year’s Big Dance was announced.

Normally after Selection Sunday, there are a handful of teams who feel snubbed and whose fans take to the interwebs to protest being left off the dance card, but not so much in 2017. While there are some discussions about seeding in certain cases, there has been little in the way of bellyaching from teams who didn’t make the field.

In mid-February, the NCAA Selection Committee released an early Top 15 for the first time, and Vitale agrees that may have had something to do with a more solid field and some real excitement about this tournament.

“I think it’s really great what [the committee] did,” Vitale told us in an exclusive interview. “It creates a little excitement for college basketball, and creates some interest among people. I think the committee did really a phenomenal job this year, they really did.”