NCAA makes major change to college basketball National Championship start time

The start time for the 2025 college basketball national championship game is moving up. The 2025 national championship game will tip off at 8:50 p.m. E.T., it was announced on Tuesday.

In the past, the game has tipped off at 9:20 p.m. E.T. You can check out the tweet announcing the news below:

🚨 National Championship tip-off time!

The 2025 National Championship will tip off at 8:50pm ET – 30 minutes earlier than the typical start time. pic.twitter.com/h39KTt16Q0

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) January 28, 2025

The 2025 college basketball national championship game will be played on Monday, April 7 at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas. The Final Four will begin two days earlier with semifinal games on Saturday, April 5.

The college basketball season is in full swing at the moment as we are a month-and-a-half away from Selection Sunday.

The 2025 NCAA Tournament field will be announced on Sunday, March 16, with the First Four games being played March 18 and March 19.

The first two rounds of the college basketball NCAA Tournament will take place from March 20-23.

The Sweet 16 and Elite 8 will be played March 27-March 30, leading into the Final 4 in San Antonio. Moving up the college basketball national championship start time makes sense, especially since the game is being played during the week.

It will be interesting to see if the earlier start time helps ratings and leads to more people watching.

Jay Bilas: SEC Tournament will be more difficult to win than national championship

The SEC has dominated college basketball so far this season and has proven time and time again that it has the best league in the sport. ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas believes that the SEC is so good that it will be harder to win the SEC Tournament than the NCAA Tournament this year.

Bilas explained his reasoning Monday morning when speaking on the McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning show.

“Winning the SEC Tournament is going to be harder than winning the national championship, because you’re doing it day after day after day and all of that stuff, and playing better teams throughout the course of it than you would play in the course of the NCAA Tournament,” Jay Bilas said.

He added that because of the gauntlet that you will have to go through to win the SEC Tournament, whichever team does win it could be at a disadvantage as the NCAA Tournament begins.

“The one concern I’d have in the SEC, there’s two things — if you win the SEC Tournament, how much gas are you going to have left in the tank after that?” Bilas said.

His other concern is that SEC teams will have to adjust to different types of officiating once the NCAA Tournament begins. Bilas has watched numerous SEC games this year and said that officials are letting teams be more physical in that league than in other conferences around the country.

“The other thing is the SEC has been officiated as football this year. Some of those games are football games. … And that’s not going to be the same whistle they get in the NCAA Tournament,” Jay Bilas said. “But I tend to think that the gauntlet they’re going through is going to make them tougher than some of the other conferences are going to be when they get to the tournament.”