First Four

The First Four (also the “Early Eight”) is a play-in round of the NCAA Division I men's and women's basketball tournaments. It consists of two games contested between the four lowest-ranked teams in the field (usually the four lowest-ranked conference champions), and two games contested between the four lowest-seeded "at-large" teams in the field, which determine the last four teams to qualify for the 64-team bracket that plays the first round.

In 2001, the champion of the recently-formed Mountain West Conference began to receive an automatic bid to the men's tournament. The NCAA did not wish to reduce the number of at-large teams in the tournament, which therefore expanded the field to 65 teams; to preserve a 64-team bracket for the first round, an Opening Round game would be played between the two lowest-seeded automatic qualifying teams, with the winner of this play-in game advancing to the first round.

In 2011, the men's tournament expanded to 68 teams, resulting in the expansion of the opening round to four games. Upon the adoption of this format, the opening round games were now referred to as the "first round games", and the round of 64—the tournament's first round proper—was now referred to as the "second round". However in 2016, the NCAA officially rebranded the games as the "First Four" (a colloquialism that had been used to refer to the games, in reference to the long-time branding of the tournament semi-finals as the "Final Four"), and returned to referring to the round of 64 as the "first round".

All of the Opening Round games and current-format men's First Four games, with the exception of 2021 (as the tournament was held entirely within the state of Indiana), have been played at the University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio.^[1][2] In 2022, the 68-team format and the First Four was extended to the Division I women's tournament for the first time.