NCAA Division 1 - Men Live Streaming and TV Schedule

About NCAA Division 1 - Men

The NCAA Division I Men’s Soccer Championship, also known as the College Cup, is an annual soccer tournament played each November through December in the United States among teams in Division I after the end of the regular season (which runs from August to November). The Championship was created in 1959 by the NCAA and the first tournament had eight teams, which was won by Saint Louis University.

Initially, the Men’s Soccer Championship was a tournament for all colleges, regardless of what division the team played in. It did not become solely a Division I championship until 1972 when the NCAA created a separate tournament for Division II and Division III.

As college soccer continued to grow and develop in the United States, the number of teams featuring in the Division I Men’s Soccer Championship has grown. In 1972, it had 24 teams. By 1993, eight more teams had been added, but it was not until 2001 that the tournament finally reached its present 48-team format.

There are over 200 soccer teams nationwide who have Division I status that feature in 24 conferences, including the Ivy League, the Patriot League, the Atlantic Coast, the Big East, and the Pac-12. Under the current 48-team format, the pool is selected as such: 24 teams gain automatic tickets, and the other 24 receive “at-large” bids.

The 24 teams that get an automatic bid are all winners of either their respective conferences (21) or win their regular conference season titles (3) – notably the West Coast, Pac-12, and the Ivy League conferences do not have separate conference tournaments. The other 24 teams are selected based on how they perform during the regular season, as well as the overall strength of their conference versus that of their opponents.

Once the 48 teams are selected, they are then seeded by the NCAA selection committee. Only the top 16 teams receive a seed, and in men’s soccer, these top 16 teams also get an added benefit: they get to skip the first round. The remaining 32 teams are paired off according to geographic location and have to battle it out in the first round for an opportunity to play a seeded team in the second round.

This is done to give seeded teams an advantage to progress to the later rounds (in addition to the seeded side always getting to serve as the home team) but there are occasions where unseeded sides do upset the odds. One example of this was at the 2019 championship, in which UC Santa Barbara beat two seeded sides (St. Mary’s and Indiana University-Bloomington).

The last four teams to make up the contestants of the College Cup come from each of the winners the four pre-designated brackets, which are simply called “Regional One”, “Regional Two”, and so on.

Ultimately, the winner of this tournament is crowned the national champion of NCAA Division I men’s collegiate soccer. Players in this competition also get the chance to clinch the coveted Hermann Trophy, an annual prize given to the best men’s soccer player in the United States. Past recipients of this honor include players like USMNT icon Claudio Reina, current ESPN personality Alexi Lalas, and current Team USA player Jordan Morris.

Saint Louis University, University of Virginia, and Indiana University-Bloomington are historically the most successful sides in NCAA Division I Men’s soccer history. Hence, that is what makes unseeded UC Santa Barbara’s victory over Indiana at the 2019 championship in a match that many fans live-streamed online that much more impressive. In recent times, other teams, such as Stanford and the University of Maryland, have started to break into the elite group, but they still have a long way to go to match the success of the top three in terms of their trophy cabinets.

Media Coverage

Coverage of NCAA Division I Men’s soccer in the US is provided through a range of options. There are both local and national broadcasts on TV, while fans can also follow their favorite college team via radio in some locations. Online live streaming and on-demand access have become increasingly more popular, with many broadcasters and NCAA’s own website providing access for fans.

In several international locations, such as in Canada and in the UK, there are periodic TV broadcasts and live streaming selections available both during the course of the regular season as well as for the College Cup.