How To Watch NCAA March Madness Live 2025

It’s almost time to for  March Madness with the 2025 NCAA Tournament upon us.

The tournament starts on March 18, and ends with the National Championship game happening on April 5. Between that time, there will be 67 games taking place over the course of three and a half weeks. For any basketball fans out there, this is what you live all year round for.

With cord cutting becoming a bigger and bigger trend, finding out how to watch NCAA March Madness in 2025 can be a difficult task. But we have everything you need to know here. Starting with where you can watch the games, what teams will be in the tournament, what days the tournament will be on, and so forth.

Here’s how you can watch the tournament live. The easiest way would be with the NCAA March Madness app, which is available on just about every platform imaginable.

The only downside to the app, is that you cannot watch every single game on the app, for free. If you subscribe to cable or select streaming TV services, then you can login with your TV provider and watch all of it through the app. Otherwise, you’ll be limited in what you can see. But the National Championship Game will be available for everyone to watch in the March Madness app.

There are a couple of streaming TV services that are going to be great for watching all of the games in March Madness, which we’ve laid out in the table below. The games will all be on CBS, TBS, TNT and TruTV. So in order to make sure that you can watch every game, you’ll want to choose a service that offers all four channels.

All of these streaming services will work for watching the tournament this year, however there are a couple of caveats. One, Sling TV does not have locals, so it is missing CBS. You can get around that by getting an OTA antenna from Amazon. Which you can get these for just a few bucks these days.

Every service that is listed in the table above also offers free trials, most of them are a week long – YouTube TV is five days. Now if you’re looking for the best option, it’s going to be YouTube TV. We say this because you can record as many games as you want and watch them later. Fubo TV and Hulu + Live TV offer cloud DVR, but it is limited. YouTube TV is unlimited and you can record everything – literally.

When does NCAA March Madness start?

The tournament officially gets under way on March 18. With the first four games happening in Dayton, OH on March 14 and March 15. Before the field of 64 starts on March 16.

After Selection Sunday, there is the “First Four” which are the eight teams that were barely able to get in. They’ll battle for the last four spots in the tournament. With the first round officially starting on March 20. After the first weekend, we’ll already be down to 16 teams, come March 27. That will then break it down further to the Final Four after that weekend’s games.

And after that, it’ll be down to the semifinals and finals for the National Championship.

The first four will take place in Dayton Ohio. With the first and second rounds in Lexington, Kentucky; Providence, Rhode Island; Seattle, Washington; Wichita, Kansas; Cleveland, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Raleigh, North Carolina. With the regionals happening in Newark, New Jersey; San Francisco, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Indianapolis, Indiana

The Final Four will take place in San Antonio.

Who’s the favorite to win the tournament?

The best thing about March Madness, is you never know who could win the whole thing. Right now, the #1 team in the country is Auburn. However, Vegas has the best odds on Duke right now at +340. Duke has had a pretty good season this year, being the #2 overall seed in the tournament. Just behind Duke is Aurburn +420 odds, who is the current overall number one seed in the tournament.

Others with high odds include Houston, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas Tech and Michigan Tech.