What’s going to matter most for NCAA Tournament selection and seeding this go-around in 2024?
This, of course, is the age-old question that bracketologists look to answer every year, and your answer will tend to vary depending on the makeup of the selection committee and what those individuals value. We won’t know for certain which tenets of a team sheet this year’s group likes best until we get that sweet top-16 preview reveal in mid-February (and even then, sometimes those don’t fully align with how it actually goes down in March).
But I think it’s safe for our bracketology to operate on one core property: Did you do enough good to outweigh the bad?
That’s where I stand with today’s projection, which may have a handful of controversial choices that I stand by nonetheless.
For example, it seems downright preposterous for Auburn to place as high as a 3-seed given that they’ve won exactly zero Quad 1 games. That typically doesn’t equal entrance to the tournament at all. But here’s the thing with Auburn—everything else says they’re really, really good. They’re 16-3. They’re top-11 in all four team sheet metrics, top-5 in both on the predictive side. They’ve got six Quad 2 wins and nothing worse than a road loss to surprisingly tough NET #76 Appalachian State. Their non-conference schedule may not look great, but they scheduled some pretty solid teams on paper (Indiana, St. Bonaventure, Virginia Tech, USC, etc.) and got a bit unlucky with how those teams have actually performed this year. And, perhaps most importantly, they’ve only played two Q1 games, both away from Neville Arena against other top-4 seeds, and both were decided by two buckets. Just based on luck of the draw, Auburn’s schedule is incredibly backloaded, with six Q1 contests in the next nine, starting today at Mississippi State. I don’t see that zero in the leftmost win column being an issue right now when everything else on this team sheet is pretty sterling. Now, if Auburn still has zero Q1 wins after this month-long stretch of quality opportunities, then we’d have an ordeal on our hands. But I don’t see it that way at the current moment in time.
Another choice sure to leave people upset is Michigan State, slotting in at a 9-seed even though the Spartans are 2-7 against Quad 1 opponents. That’s certainly a knock against them, as is the 12-8 overall record and performance metrics in the 50s. But, of course, that’s only telling half the battle. MSU has looked rock-solid in many of these top-tier games, win or lose (six-point neutral-court loss to Arizona, three-point road loss to Illinois, 24-point semi-home victory over Baylor), and they have yet to stumble to a bad team (even that opening night home loss to James Madison is just Quad 2). As such, the predictive metrics are still firm believers in the Spartans, placing them 18th in both BPI and KenPom. Pair those traits with a very tough schedule, both in non-con and overall, and I feel comfortable in saying that Michigan State would be a tournament team today, and their aforementioned predictive metrics being near top-tier would earn them a higher seed than many think they deserve.
That’s all the fun in bracketology—trying to figure out where all the pieces of the puzzle fit in with each other based on your own knowledge of the past without someone explicitly telling you how to do it. It’s like they dumped the puzzle on your kitchen table, then threw the reference art away, and said, “figure it out.”
Well, we’ve still got a little under two months to go before our-puzzle building deadline, and bracketologists just like me are working on piecing it all together. Consider this projection the edge pieces done with our top line of teams (Purdue, Houston, UConn, North Carolina) really starting to solidify.
Enjoy the new Bauertology projection for Saturday, Jan. 27 before diving into today’s massive slate of hoops, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the brand-new graphics as well! I spent a lot of hours this week building out the templates on Photoshop to make sure they look just right, and I’m very pleased with how they turned out. Hopefully you’ll like them too!
