Welcome to a new era of NCAA Tournament basketball. Whether you resisted expansion at every turn or welcomed it — and if you welcomed it, please identify yourselves to the doctors in the white lab coats — we now live in a world of a 76-team field and all that comes with it.
Throughout the expansion process, we heard about it watering down the regular season, rewarding mediocrity, creating travel nightmares for a handful of teams every year, and so much more. But no one ever considered the Bracketologists. Expansion has meant more than having to evaluate a few extra teams. It’s also led to quite a bit of guesswork around what the selection committee will prioritize when it puts the puzzle together in March.
If you want to nerd out about that, scroll down to the bottom where I get into methodology. If you’re normal and just want to see where your team is projected, without further ado, here it is:
Bracket minutiae
Last four byes
- Tennessee
- Clemson
- BYU
- California
Last four in
- Oregon State
- Utah
- Alabama
- Colorado State
First four out
- Harvard
- St. John’s
- Virginia
- Miami
Next four out
- Texas A&M
- Davidson
- San Diego State
- South Florida
Bids by conference
- Big Ten: 13
- Big 12: 12
- SEC: 10
- ACC: 9
- Pac-12: 3
- BIG EAST: 2
- Ivy: 2
Procedural bumps
- Minnesota: No. 5 seed to No. 6 seed
- Oklahoma State: No. 6 seed to No. 5 seed
- Oregon: No. 6 seed to No. 7 seed
- NC State: No. 7 seed to No. 6 seed
Scores are only part of the story.
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Three teams at the top
There seems to be a consensus that, in some order, South Carolina, UConn and USC are the top three teams headed into the season. While it may sound boring to say those three will jockey for position all year long, it actually comes with plenty of intrigue.
South Carolina, for now, has the slightest edge over UConn. Both teams return a ton of talent from Final Four squads a year ago, but I feel the Gamecocks added just a little more firepower, led by Texas transfer Jordan Lee and four top-30 freshmen. While the Huskies’ upside sees them cutting down the nets in April, there are a few more uncertainties around the roster, though early returns from freshmen Olivia Vukosa and Jovana Popovic are promising.
As for USC, the Trojans bring back JuJu Watkins, who sat out last year, alongside the top-rated recruiting class in the country. They also have national title upside, but don’t be surprised if it takes a little while for them to gel. Remember how long it took Paige Bueckers to return to form after she sat out the 2023-24 season.
Making sense of the bubble
Before you say it, I know. I’m disappointed by the lack of mid-major representation in the expanded field, too. Don’t come at me with the pitchforks just yet — Harvard is knocking on the door and Davidson isn’t far behind. And in the preseason, the difference between being one of the last teams in and first teams out is thinner than the “patch” of hair on the crown of my head.
In the preseason, the high-majors just have an advantage as they are a little easier to project. There’s (slightly) less roster turnover, more of the freshmen have been thoroughly scouted and they enroll higher-profile transfers. All I can really do in the preseason is look at who was on the team last year, how good the team was, who the team lost and who it brought in.
Don’t you worry. As I always say, if you disagree with where I placed a team, let the games play out. If you’re right, I’ll adjust accordingly.
Bracket methodology
I won’t bore you with this every update but, to start, it might help to dive into the nerd stuff.
The first thing you’ll notice if you compare this bracket to others in the bracketology landscape is that this one may have some different teams slotted as small conference autobids. I wanted to keep it as fair as possible so, for now, one-bid conferences are represented by the team that coaches picked in the preseason to win the league. In the event that a league did not release a poll prior to publication, I went with the highest-ranked team according to Bart Torvik.
If you can get past me having Abilene Christian coming out of the UAC instead of Eastern Kentucky, we can move on.
The NCAA women’s basketball committee has its principles and procedures and I do my best to simulate how I anticipate those in the room will follow them. I didn’t realize until I started how much more difficult it would be to do in a 76-team field with bloated power conferences.
To start, each of the top four seeds per region need to be from a different conference unless there are unavoidable conflicts. I think it’s impossible to avoid conflicts in the current landscape and, in my bracket, the SEC and Big Ten both had too many teams on the top four lines to too keep them separate. In both instances (Philadelphia 1 for the Big Ten and Las Vegas 1 for the SEC), I managed to make it so those teams would not match up until the regional final.
The bloated, 18-team conferences have also meant geography cannot be nearly as big a concern as it was in the past. The committee used to prioritize travel over just about everything — sometimes even over bracket balance, though they’d never admit it. I don’t see how that is possible in the current configuration without setting up conference teams to play each other in the first or second rounds.
Take No. 9 seed Colorado for example. I didn’t want to send them across the country to South Carolina for the first two rounds. But I already had conference rival Kansas as the No. 8 seed in Los Angeles. Of course I could have then moved Kansas, but only if I swapped the Jayhawks with Villanova and sent the Wildcats all the way west. Sometimes there are no good solutions!
You’ll also see a heading above called “procedural bumps.” The rules allow committee members to move a non-top-four seed up or down one seed line in order to satisfy its principles. In the case of this bracket, for example, I needed to bump Oregon from a No. 6 to a No. 7 seed because all of the 3/14/6/11 already included a Big Ten team. By swapping them with NC State, the Wolf Pack can safely face Iowa in the second round, while the Ducks are matched with BYU and Texas.
Next Update: Mid-November
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