Happy New Year, one and all! Let’s start 2025 off right with the first official Bauertology of the college basketball season. (I say “official” because I did put together a preseason bracket for fun back in November—one that’s already starting to look completely busted.)
Today’s bracket will look completely busted in due time, too. Conference play has only just begun, and the results that take place over the next two months will surely shake things up, so don’t get too bogged down in the details about where your team sits currently. Just take today’s projection as a cue for whether you should be feeling good about your team’s position, or if they’ll have work to do to find themselves in a better spot on Selection Sunday.
I’m also putting it out there that this bracket (and every subsequent one from here on out) is based purely on the numbers we’re seeing at this very moment. This is why teams like Arizona and Texas Tech are absent from the projection. Predictive data like KenPom and BPI say that the Wildcats and Red Raiders are overdue to turn around their slow starts and eventually make their way to at-large selections. But those results haven’t played out yet, and as it stands, neither the Wildcats (78.3 résumé metric average, 0-5 in Quad 1) nor the Red Raiders (84.0 résumé average, 0-3 in Q1/2) have much of a case for a bid at the current time.
Also worth touching on—building the bracket while not upsetting any principles is going to be a headache! This is something I thought would happen with the advent of mega conferences, and we’re already seeing it coming into play. Fortunately, I was able to avoid creating any in-conference rematches before the Sweet Sixteen, but don’t be shocked if other bracketologists are forecasting those as early as the second round, so long as it’s legal. The one snafu I ran into when bracketing was putting the 12-seed First Four matchup of Louisville vs. St. Bonaventure into the field. Because the other at-large play-in (Saint Mary’s vs. Iowa on the 11 line) was bracketed into a Thursday/Saturday pod, Louisville-St. Bona is then required to find a Friday/Sunday pod, in order to prevent a team from having to play a tournament game two days in a row. And unfortunately, the only available Friday/Sunday pod on the 12 line is the Seattle subregional, which already features Utah State (played previously by St. Bonaventure) and West Virginia (played previously by Louisville). But since there’s no other place to go, a potential first- and second-round rematch we must create. Oh well!
You may also be wondering how I’m choosing the automatic bid representative for each of the 31 conferences this season. The answer? I’ll be taking the team from each conference that ranks highest in BRCT on that day. You may have noticed the creation of a new tab on the Bauertology homepage since I last posted in November; BRCT (the Bauertology Résumé Counting Tool, pronounced “bracket”) is my own résumé metric that I’ve developed to measure how deserving each of the 364 teams are of receiving an at-large bid, using the NET rankings as their basis. Keep your eyes peeled, as I’ll be delivering a full write-up on how exactly BRCT works sometime later this month.
But in the meantime, enough chit-chat—enjoy the start of the new year, and enjoy the first official Bauertology projection of the 2024-25 season for Jan. 2. And leave your questions, comments, and concerns if you have ’em!
