Bracketology 2025: This Process Needs Work

We begin today’s post with a live look at me at about 5:04 p.m. Central last night when the 8/9 game in Auburn’s pod in Lexington popped up:

Again, since the men’s Selection Committee ditched the S-curve and decided to make the tournament more regional, you get nonsense like this. Yes, protected seeds are only protected from a crowd disadvantage in the first round. But it makes no sense to have your No. 1 overall seed potentially placed at a disadvantage in the second. This is not a way to bracket a tournament if you want to crown the best team possible as national champion. Instead, you crown a contending team that happened to get the best draw.

NEW: T.J. Rives is hosting a Monday afternoon bracket recap show on the CBB Coast to Coast Youtube Channel. I joined earlier to discuss the Committee’s work.

My Results

Surprisingly, a half-hour later, I found that my final projection wasn’t as much of a disaster as I expected.

• Two missed at-large teams: Indiana and West Virginia (who I will get to shortly). EVERYONE on the Bracket Matrix had the Mountaineers in, by the way, as of yesterday.
• 44 teams seeded correctly. (39 in 2024, best number since 2022.)
• 16 teams seeded within 1 line. (15 in 2024.)
• So, 60 teams seeded on or within 1 line. (54 in 2024)
• 6 teams seeded within 2 lines. (Better than the 11 from 2024.)
• 20 teams seeded exactly on the Seed List.
• 18 teams seeded within 1 spot on the Seed List.
• 8 teams seeded within 2 spots on the Seed List.
• 2 teams seeded within 3 spots on the Seed List.

Grievances

Let’s go down the bracket and see some of the things that stood out to me.

South

• I’ve already mentioned the very first thing, the Louisville-Creighton winner getting Auburn at Rupp Arena, if the Cardinals do advance.
• Off topic a bit and very pedantic, but we need commentators to stop saying that Auburn may play Louisville on Kentucky’s home court. No, they will be playing in Kentucky’s home arena, but with standardized, “Stepford” courts, it’s not the same court.
• UC San Diego as a 12 seed, as a double conference champion with a top 40 NET.
• Michigan ending up as a 5 being sent to Denver for Thursday/Saturday games after winning a late Sunday afternoon Big Ten Tournament title. The seeding was bad, the placement worse, and further proof that that particular timeslot doesn’t help the conference at all. Remember when Michigan won the title in 2017 as the 8 seed and still ended up as 7 national seed (paired in an Indianapolis pod with ... 2 seed Louisville; maybe the Cardinals’ placement this year was payback for that).
• North Carolina. Where do I begin here? On the positive side, the Tar Heels’ selection showed how the Committee values metrics now and is something to work with in the future. However, this pick also lays bare one of the biggest issues with the entire process—not that humans are involved, but who the specific people are. Sure, you can say that Committee members recuse themselves when their specific institutions or conferences come up. But are they also recusing themselves when discussing teams that might be in direct competition for an at-large spot with theirs? There is also an element of social politics here—you generally don’t want to disappoint a colleague.

East

• This was one of my better regions, so my grievances are few. But sending 3 seed Wisconsin to Denver to play at altitude Thursday after four Big Ten Tournament games is a bracketing mistake on par with Louisville as Auburn’s second-round opponent.
• As soon as Vanderbilt popped up as a 10 seed, you should have known the SEC was going to have a great evening and was likely to get 14 teams in.

South

• Gonzaga as Houston’s potential second-round opponent is almost as bad as the Auburn-Louisville combo, but better in the sense that there’s no crowd disadvantage issue.
• The Big Ten’s seedings made no sense based on what’s been happening lately. Purdue got a higher seed than Michigan based on metrics. The same goes for Illinois being a seed line lower than the Wolverines. While the Fighting Illini have rebounded with three straight wins since losing to Duke at the Garden, the Boilermakers have struggled—3-6 in their last nine.
• Texas had a decent case, particularly metrics-wise, but I was really surprised the Longhorns’ non-conference schedule didn’t doom them.

West

• The biggest surprise in this region, another I did well in, was Memphis getting a 5 seed despite some really questionable metrics and losses. In this case, a strong non-conference schedule provided a boost. If only there were more consistency elsewhere in the bracket!
• When the commercial break for this region came up, it was clear that one of Arkansas, Oklahoma, or West Virginia was going to get left off. In the end, it was the Mountaineers. But, if you included the Sooners based in no small part on a 13-0 non-conference record, you should have included the Mountaineers too. The Sooners had both five-game and four-game losing streaks in SEC play, while West Virginia’s worst span in Big 12 play was a three-game slide. OU was 7-13 after conference play started, while WVU was 10-11. One of the reasons that the Mountaineers were left out was the absence of Tucker DeVries—but they went 13-11 without him, including a home win over Iowa State and the program’s first-ever win at Kansas. This was not a team that gave up when one of its best players became unavailable. At worst, the Committee could have sent them to Dayton.

Solutions

Being an ideas person, I figured I would close this post by sharing some ideas on improving the entire process from selection of the at-larges, to seeding the field, to bracketing, which is still the Committee’s biggest issue.

Selection Process

The NCAA needs to do one of three things:

• Take at-large selection out of the Committee’s hands entirely by using a metric, Wins Above Bubble (WAB) would be preferable since that is its whole reason for existing (for the love of Naismith, don’t use the NET), with the top 37 non-auto-qualifiers getting in. Then, let the committee seed and bracket.
• Get athletic directors and conference commissioners who have so many other things to do and have so many potential conflicts off the Committee. Yes, you need a Division I Men’s Basketball Committee for administrative reasons, but the Selection Committee should be independent and be composed of people who can focus solely on the work and don’t have employment ties to the teams involved.
• If you insist on keeping the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee as the selection committee, you really need to tighten up the rules in terms of discussing not only members’ institutions but also teams that are in direct competition with them, particularly when it comes to the bubble. Tournament shares are at stake!

Team Eligibility and Evaluation

• I have never been a fan of the idea that teams with a sub-.500 conference record should be automatically excluded from the tournament, particularly in an era of super-sized leagues with inconsistent schedules. But, this would solve many current selection issues and also reduce the calls for expansion. Here are the at-large teams who would have been left out because of this rule:
• SEC (6): Mississippi State, Georgia, Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Oklahoma, Texas
• Big Ten: none
• Big 12: none (Baylor finished 11-11 in the Big 12 after departing the tournament in the quarters; however, West Virginia would have finished 10-11, making their case moot.)
• Big East: none
• ACC: none
• MW/WCC: none

In other words, Greg Sankey and Brett Yormark would never let this rule be implemented.

• A rule that everyone should be able to agree on is returning to giving the final 10 or 15 games of the season added scrutiny—with so many changes in terms of NIL and, especially, the transfer portal, it can take teams time to gel. Teams change dramatically from November to March, and it’s time to stop living with the fantasy that they don’t. Yes, a team’s entire body of work should matter, but we can’t ignore that team may be different when heading into the NCAAs than they were when they won a Thanksgiving tournament. Amazingly, this seems to be the argument the Committee used to exclude West Virginia, so again, consistency up and down the bracket would help.

Seeding

• Again, be consistent! That’s all I’m asking for here. Every year, it looks like the Committee spends its time on the top four and bottom five lines of the bracket, and throws up its hands when it comes to seed lines 5 and 10. You might as well just do a random draw at this point. If you’re valuing teams’ quality wins at the top of the bracket, that should continue all the way down. If it’s wins away from home, great! If it’s metrics, then do that. The hodgepodge that currently results helps no one.
• If all games are important, don’t discount Sunday championship games. And this doesn’t apply to just the Big Ten and SEC. I’m specifically thinking of 2018, when 24-9 Penn and 18-14 Harvard were Ivy co-champs, but the Crimson were the 1 seed. While the Quakers’ resume was good enough to end up as a 14, the Crimson were clearly a 16 and in place as the auto qualifier before the early Sunday afternoon final. Guess where Penn ended up? The committee merely swapped out a team that could have won a game (or two) with one destined to likely lose—so the Quakers ended up as a 16 playing Kansas in Wichita—losing 76-60.

Bracketing

• This is another “blast from the past.” Go back to focusing on the seed list/S-curve and building a bracket from it rather than trying to make things as regional as possible. If the women’s Selection Committee can do it, there’s no reason for the men’s to not do it, especially since the men’s tournament is the NCAA’s biggest economic engine.
• Finally, the Committee may want to let the bracket play out from the first round on, but really, they should focus on it playing out only after the first weekend. If you really want to “protect” your protected top 16 teams, look at those potential round of 32 matchups too, then bracket accordingly.

Implementing those two rules and just taking a little more time and thinking things through would greatly improve the competitive balance of the bracket from top to bottom and across all four regions.

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