Welcome to 2023!
The college basketball season is getting better and better by the day, as we’re now in the thick of conference play. This means two things—1) teams can win or lose against familiar opponents on any given night, and 2) an actual sort of structure to bracketology is beginning to take shape.
We’ve already seen a good bit of the former (just look at some of the unexpected results in conferences like the Big Ten), and that will only continue to develop. As that provides the flavor to the zany college basketball goodness we all love, it also allows to start being a little more “scientific” with these brackets.
While conference play is only a couple games deep, we can start to see where teams are expected to fall in their respective leagues. And so the traditional statistics that bracketologists use to evaluate teams’ résumés—that’s your NET rankings, predictive and performance metrics, quadrant wins and victories, road record, etc.—become a little more based in fact than conjecture. That’s why you’ll see teams that exceeded expectations like Kansas State have skyrocketed up the rankings, while others that have failed to excite like Kentucky are seeing their stock plummeting.
As a result, there’s quite a few shakeups from the last bracket released on Christmas, but the changes will be less drastic going forward now that the data is starting to come together in a meaningful way.
All of this is one big long way of saying that we’re at the time of year where you can start taking bracket projections seriously… at least a little bit. (There’s still two whole months of games to play, after all.)
So take a look at the latest projections below and let me know what you think! Constructive feedback is always appreciated.
Happy 2023 to all my readers, and let’s play some basketball!
THE BRACKET
THE TRUE SEED LIST, BUBBLE, AND BIDS BY CONFERENCE
