My, would you look at the time!
The offseason is both too long and too short—I’ve been anticipating this moment where college basketball is back in our lives for seven ceaseless months… And yet, visions of the prior season remain in my memory bank like their events just played out yesterday. I think that just goes to show how much of a grip this sport has on my psyche. (That was already evident by the fact that I willingly choose to spend countless hours of my free time combing over tiny, little numbers and data points near-daily for almost half a year. All for the love of the game!)
If you’re reading this, then the 2025-26 Division I men’s basketball season is already underway, with Winthrop and Queens getting us started from the Rock Hill Sports & Event Center at 8 a.m. sharp on Monday morning. (Or 6 a.m., if you live in the Mountain Time Zone like me… Let alone the die-hard hoops fanatics out on the Hawaiian Islands getting up at 3 a.m. to watch two teams that rank greater than 150th in KenPom duke it out. That’s dedication!) And that means that a new season must be celebrated accordingly in the only way I know how: Bauertology!
Now if you know me, then you know that I’m not too keen on making predictions this far in advance. Selection Sunday is more than 130 days away, and any attempts to guess what the bracket will look like on that date with a grand total of zero data points to point to currently are surely fruitless. But, damn, if it ain’t fun to do!
So, yes, I’ve put together a preseason bracket and seed list, merely for the fun of doing it. (It’s also good practice to get back into the swing of accounting for this year’s bracketing principles and building graphics.) As such, I implore you not to take today’s projection too seriously. It’s all baseless conjecture, built on nothing other than a gut feeling for how the season could potentially play out, as is any bracket being built at this time. It’s all just for fun, simply to get discussions in motion and build excitement for a new year of college hoops ready to settle upon us once again.
And thus, with no analysis to be made of how the bracket shapes up, given that there’s no data to go on, I’ll opt to use the remainder of this post to talk about the Bauertology website and exciting things ahead!
The Bauertology Resources page is already undergoing updates! The new PDF for 2026’s bracketing principles is up, as are the spreadsheets detailing the distances from each of this year’s NCAA Tournament sites to every postseason-eligible team. You’ll read there about some of the difficulties that I went through building those tables for 2026 (thanks for nothing, NCAA!), as well as the creative solutions that other bracketologists and I used to get them up and running. (Major kudos to @AI_Bracketology for all his help!) As for the rematches-to-avoid page… Just wait a few months. We’ve still got a ton of matchups that aren’t set in stone yet thanks to numerous multi-team events (MTEs) to account for in late 2025, but those should be mostly wrapped up by Christmastime, so that page ought to be a go in early 2026.
Then, of course, there’s BRCT! I was thrilled to be able to introduce my Bauertology Résumé Calculation Tool to the public last year to much acclaim, and it’s already good to go for 2026 with slight formula tweaks (now that we have 365 Division I teams instead of 364), as well as a simpler, more accurate data-pulling system when it comes to grabbing team numbers and game locations. Expect BRCT to go live shortly after the NET rankings release, given that NET is the key cog in how BRCT operates.
You’ll also notice a handful of new graphics making the rounds here and on my Twitter page. Back in March, I made a few branding updates, most notably freshening up my main Bauertology icon and the Bauertology word logo, so as to stop using graphics and fonts that include elements and/or photos created by someone else. I figure that if I’m serious about my own bracketology work, then all the branding should come from me and me only! And I’m pretty satisfied with how the new look turned out—simple, smooth, and pleasing to the eye. Fits the rest of the Bauertology website and the already-in-use bracket and seed list graphics to a T!
And another thing on the horizon: I’m working on implementing a tool that allows bracketologists to make quick, easy comparisons between teams’ résumés using the most important team-sheet stats (NET, Quads, metrics, etc.). Still working out the kinks on how to make that tool work publicly and how to implement it into the website, but that’s a project that I hope to have ready by the end of this season, so keep an eye out for it!
As for posts, this one will probably be it for 2025. I don’t think it’s really worth the time to do consistent bracketology this early with such limited data. Picking up at the start of 2026 when conference play is underway and every team at least has a dozen or so games under their belt sounds like a better approach, and it’s what I’ve done in the past as well. Expect the next Bauertology bracket/seed list to come soon after the New Year’s ball drops.
And that’s it! I can’t believe that college basketball is already back in our lives, and I’m very much looking forward to spending the next five months and change watching countless games of this incredible sport, crunching the numbers behind it, and seeing how it all unfolds. It’s a journey I’ve undertaken for well over a decade now, and one I hope you’ll gladly share with me. Enjoy the Bauertology preseason projection below, and happy hooping!
