Every year, someone books a big meeting during the Elite Eight. Don't be that person. Here's how to get the entire NCAA Tournament on your calendar so you can plan around it — or at least watch on your phone under the table.

How March Madness Scheduling Works

The tournament runs from Selection Sunday (mid-March) through the National Championship in early April. The schedule looks like this:

• First Four: 4 play-in games (Tuesday & Wednesday of Selection Week)
• First Round: 32 games across 8 venues (Thursday & Friday)
• Second Round: 16 games (Saturday & Sunday)
• Sweet 16: 8 games (Thursday & Friday of the following week)
• Elite Eight: 4 games (Saturday & Sunday)
• Final Four: 2 national semifinals (Saturday)
• National Championship: Monday night

That's 67 games over 19 days. Games run from roughly noon to midnight ET on the big first-round days.

The Bracket Problem

Unlike a regular season where games are announced months in advance, March Madness matchups only get determined when the previous round is completed. Your calendar needs to update as each round of results comes in.

Static .ics downloads don't handle this well — you download the bracket on Selection Sunday, import it, and then by the time the Sweet 16 rolls around your calendar is full of placeholder games that don't reflect who actually won.

SportsCal's March Madness calendar updates automatically as each round's matchups are confirmed. When your team wins Friday night and the Sweet 16 matchup is announced, it appears in your calendar without you doing anything.

Where to Watch March Madness in 2026

The tournament airs across CBS and the Turner networks — TBS, TNT, and truTV — with streaming on Paramount+ and March Madness Live. The distribution looks roughly like this:

• CBS — Prime-time first and second round games, plus the Final Four and Championship
• TBS / TNT / truTV — The rest, split evenly across the 4-channel rotation in the early rounds
• Paramount+ — Streaming all games, plus the Live dashboard showing multiple concurrent games

Each calendar event includes a Watch Link so you know instantly where a specific game airs. On first-round Thursday and Friday, when 8 games are happening simultaneously, this becomes genuinely useful.

Can I Track Just My Team?

The March Madness calendar is tournament-wide — you can't yet filter by individual school (we're working on it for college sports). But the event titles make it easy to scan: each event is labeled with the matchup ("Duke vs. Kansas · CBS · 2:45 PM ET"), so you can spot your team instantly.