2022 NCAA Tournament: Baylor, Kentucky and Purdue headlines East Region

The regular season seems to go by in the blink of an eye, while the anticipation of waiting for the bracket to be revealed is excruciatingly long. But the bracket is finally here and as we look at the regions, some teams have easier paths to New Orleans than others and some teams are seeded higher and lower than some feel is right, a tradition like no other.

But, if you’re the kind of person who fills out their bracket based on name recognition, look no further than the East Region. The region is a who’s who of the sport’s past and present, providing some potentially marquee matchups depending on how things shake out.

Not only does the East have college basketball Blue Bloods North Carolina, UCLA, and Kentucky, but it also boasts the defending national champion Baylor as the No. 1 seed, a Virginia Tech team that just went on a run to win their first-ever ACC Tournament title and two of the strongest mid-major teams all season, Murray State and San Francisco who face off in one of the more intriguing games of the first round.

The East Region has it all, old, new, and up and coming, making the region in my opinion, the most intriguing of the four in terms of who might emerge as its representative in New Orleans. But in order to get there, first, we should learn a bit more about the teams, the players, and the first-round games we will see on Thursday and Friday.