Rules, rules, rules! Aren’t they just so much, fun?
Well, kinda.
For anyone who’s brand new to this whole bracketology thing, or for anyone who’s always had an interest in how the NCAA Tournament bracket and its matchups are created but never fully understood it, the key point is this: rules, pre-established by the tournament selection committee, are the top guiding principle that determines who goes where and who plays who when it comes time to build the bracket.
All these rules are public information, and the Bauertology website, in fact, has these available to check out from the Resources tab—just navigate there and click the big orange “bracketing principles” button. It’s got the official NCAA selection committee principles and procedures rulebook (enthralling reading material), as well as an instructional video (albeit, a year outdated), if that’s more your cup of tea.
For me, these rules are a huge part of what makes bracketology so enjoyable. Anyone with enough practice can learn how to adequately comprehend numbers and metrics and all that jazz to build a seed list, which, if you decide to stop there, is perfectly fine in its own right. But going above and beyond, actually utilizing the same bracketing principles that the actual NCAA Tournament selection committee will use in a little over two months to forecast which sites teams will be playing at and who exactly they’ll be suiting up against is just as, if not more, enjoyable than just sorting the teams into seed order.
That said, these bracketing principles can also be exactly where you start pulling your hair out. There are a surprising number of very important rules that the selection committee adheres to, many of which you may already be aware of: no conference rematches in the first round, teams can’t play in a venue that they’re hosting, BYU can’t play on Sundays or go to any potential site where they could play on a Sunday, et cetera, et cetera.
Given that one of my favorite things to do with Bauertology is educate, I won’t pass on the opportunity to explain how some of these critical principles function when the opportunity arises in my own projections (and explain exactly where the hair-pulling comes in).
Thankfully, as recently as this year, the selection committee has lessened the strictness of some of their principles. Take, for example, this one on conference balance among the top-four seed lines:
“Each of the first four teams selected from a conference shall be placed in different regions if they are seeded on the first four lines, unless five or more teams from a conference are on the four first lines. In this scenario, this principle may be relaxed.”
That bolded bit about five or more teams from the same conference didn’t exist before this past offseason. And let me tell ya, it makes a world of difference in today’s college basketball climate with how these super-conferences just dominate the seed list. (Less than half of today’s projected bracket is made up by teams outside of the Power Five. So healthy for the sport! I say, oozing visible sarcasm out of my ears.)
And that’s precisely why you’ll find the Big Ten’s No. 1 team (1-seed Michigan) and the Big Ten’s No. 4 team (3-seed Michigan State) in the same region in today’s bracket, when no such thing could have existed in years past. The appearance of 4-seed Illinois as the Big Ten’s fifth team to pop up on the top-four seed lines allows this possibility to come to fruition. It sure makes balancing the 1 through 4 seeds a heck of a lot easier, especially when we still have to consider BYU’s Sunday avoidance. (And the Cougars should be thankful—If we created this bracket with yesteryear’s principles, there’s a legitimate possibility that a 2- or 3-seed BYU would have to be bumped down to a 4 or 5 just to fit into the bracket. Not even a joke.)
One rule that remains the same from seasons prior is that teams selected to the field are not permitted to play games on back-to-back days. This is most important when considering where to place the final four at-large teams chosen for the tournament, i.e., the First Four, who play in Dayton on Tuesday and Wednesday. Given that one of these First Four games is always played on Tuesday, and the other is always played on Wednesday, it is not permissible to have both First Four pairs bracketed into Thursday/Saturday pods, or else Wednesday’s winner in Dayton would have to immediately play again on Thursday.
This principle comes into play in today’s projection, given that my last four at-large teams (Ohio State, New Mexico, Stanford, and Missouri) would all naturally end up as 11 seeds. But since all four available locations on the 11 line are Thursday/Saturday pods, given how those locations shook out when bracketing the top-four seed lines, we have no choice but to move one of our First Four matchups down to the 12 line to slide into a Friday/Sunday pod instead. This is why Miami (OH) and McNeese are elevated to the 11s today, despite the fact that their true seed remains below the at-large cut line.
So you see where the rules can create headaches! And nothing’s worse than when the real bracket is revealed and one of these principles comes into play, docking points from your own projection when you would have been right on the money had the principles just been ignored. (To pick on them once more, BYU is the main culprit of this dismay. Curse you, Cougars!)
But at the same time, that’s why learning these principles ahead of time and putting them to actual use in your own projections can be so valuable; you’re less likely to be totally blindsided when they actually happen.
Hope you enjoyed this little rules explanation! I’ll be looking to dive into some other intriguing principles down the road when they become prominent enough to point out inside my own projections. More educated masses when it comes to how bracketology functions is always a good thing!
Now let’s get to today’s Bauertology outlook. I’d advise reading last Monday’s writeup for a more detailed explanation on how my choices for at-larges and automatic bids are determined, as I’ll be abiding by those same rules the rest of the way, at least, until actual automatic bids are clinched come early March.
Hope you’re all having a wonderful 2026 thus far (I personally think that I am), and let the nonstop college hoops goodness continue!
