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For the first time in college basketball history, the selection committee will unveil the seeding of some of the top NCAA Tournament teams before the official bracket release in March. It will air on Saturday morning and give fans an in-season look at the current top 16 teams -- the top four from each region.

Viewing information

When: 12:30 pm ET, Saturday

TV: CBS

Streaming: CBS All Access

Programming details

The beginning of the 30-minute program will feature the unveiling of the current top-16 teams as of Feb. 11. NCAA Tournament chairman Mark Hollis will be on the show with host Greg Gumbel and analysts Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis. The panel will discuss the seeding and selection process along with the teams and the reasoning behind the standings.

"We are excited about giving the fans a glimpse to what the men's basketball committee is thinking at this point of the season and creating a buzz as we look toward Selection Sunday," Hollis said. "It's important to recognize after this list has been released, there is still a significant portion of the regular season to be played and every league must stage its conference tournament. There's potential for quite a bit of movement until we do it for real March 12, but this early peek will give everyone insight as to where the committee stands as we hit the stretch run of the regular season."

Later in the show, CBS Sports Bracketologist Jerry Palm will join the panel to project his current field of 68 teams, analyze the entire field and discuss teams on the bubble of an NCAA Tournament berth.

Projecting the field

It would be easy for the committee to go down the AP rankings and just list them out in order, but this reveal will give us a current look at where the committee ranks each team, based on the metrics they use to select and seed the field each year.

With six top-10 teams taking a loss last Saturday, it will make things quite interesting to see where the top teams land. That recent development in itself adds a higher degree of difficulty for the committee.

"It says the committee better be doing their homework," Hollis said via NCAA.com. "It's exciting on the one hand. On the other hand what it's doing to the process is, it's bunching together both the top of the bracket and the proverbial bubble. You have teams that are getting big wins and positioning themselves. The teams we thought were running away with it have been pulled back into the field, and the teams that maybe were out of it are being pulled back up into the field.

"It's a compression of the entire bracket. The more compression there is, the more challenging it is for the committee."

The show and the reveal, both of which have never been done before any Selection Sunday, will be an interesting dip into a midseason projection. Similar to the College Football Playoff committee, which reveals separate rankings leading up to the end of the football season, the top-16 teams, along with the criteria in which each landed there, will be made public a month in advance of the final bracket.

However, unlike the CFP reveal show, the hoops rankings won't be updated on a weekly basis. So with more than a month before Selection Sunday, there's a high probability there will be plenty of movement -- even in the top 16 teams. It's sure to bring chaos, discussion and fun. Because once the committee reveals its top teams, it will wipe the slate and begin a new discussion for the Big Dance.

"What we need to ensure is that what happens in February does not negatively impact what we do in March," Hollis said.