It’s time to take a little peek behind the bracketology curtain!
In my humble opinion, one of the most valuable assets that a bracketologist can exhibit is transparency. After all, if you’re not able to adequately explain the thought process behind your own decisions, then what good are they? That’s part of why I always to try to field questions or concerns that anyone might have about how I build my seed list in accordance with what résumé measurements that the selection committee historically tends to value.
(And when the selection committee itself does its discussions behind closed doors, somehow allowing an undeserving North Carolina team into the bracket—when the head of the committee just so happens to be UNC’s AD—WITHOUT having to provide any sort of accountability for that decision… You can see why the need for transparency is so important.)
So let’s take today’s Bauertology writeup to break down what exactly a team’s tournament résumé boils down to, and I’ll give my input on what I think tends to be the areas of emphasis that the selection committee, well, emphasizes.
First, let’s take a look at what a team sheet looks like. Here’s an example provided by Warren Nolan, whose website is always an invaluable resource during bracketology season:
Now this is pretty close to what the official selection committee team sheets look like, or, at least, looked like, as they haven’t been made publicly available for years. This can seem pretty overwhelming to the untrained eye, but you can see all the pertinent pieces of data scattered across it: the NET ranking, the quadrants, strength of schedule, metric rankings, and even every opponent and final score on the schedule that has already been tallied.
Still, it’s a lot of information, and if there’s one thing that I’ve learned in over 10 years of bracketology, it’s that the selection committee simply does not have the time or resources (or maybe even care) to ponder over every single small piece of data.
That’s why I’ve taken it upon myself to build my own simplified team profiles this season, including only the most important information, with the goal of both removing the clutter and streamlining the bracketology process. These are what the Bauertology team sheets look like:
Nice, clean, and simple—gets to the point! And while they are lacking some of the important nuance of the Warren Nolan team sheets that I showed earlier (things that I do still consider when building my seed lists), they do highlight all of the biggest, most prevalent measurements that the selection committee considers, and they really help to “KISS” (keep it simple, stupid) my evaluation and comparison procedure. (I’ve also mentioned in previous posts that I’m hoping to make these profiles publicly available at some point, once I find a way for people to be able to plug in their comparison teams of choice, without interrupting the experience for others looking to do the same thing. Not a lot of options that Google Sheets offers me in that realm, unfortunately.)
Now, having all that data in one neat place is nice, but, the numbers… what do they mean? How do we make any sense of them when it comes to putting the teams in some sort of seed order?
The way I see it, there are really five primary factors that comprise a team’s tournament résumé, which I have split up into boxes in my profiles. I’ve gone ahead and highlighted those boxes in red and numbered them in the sort of order I feel they are most emphasized by the selection committee (though all five are important and are considered greatly).
So let’s break those five boxes down by number:
1. Résumé metrics: The committee looooves metrics. Last year’s seed list aligned more with résumé metrics than they ever have in the past. And, honestly, there’s a good reason. They’re the best single-number data points that we currently have for measuring the number one most important thing: How well did you perform against your schedule? This is, of course, the ultimate goal to earn a tournament bid: Win games against the schedule you play. And that’s what the three team-sheet-official résumé metric rankings (KPI, SOR, and WAB, alongside an average of the three) quantify. The smaller the number, the better your case!
2. Quadrants: However, it’s not enough to just have good résumé metrics—you can easily compile good numbers in that category by beating all the teams you’re supposed to beat and losing to all the teams you’re supposed to lose to. The quadrants defray that a bit by answering this question: How many big, meaty wins did you collect against fellow tournament-level teams? This is why you hear so much about Quad 1 wins, i.e., beating teams that rank 1-30 in NET at home, 1-50 on a neutral court, or 1-75 on the road. This is further broken down into Quad 1A, which is basically just Quad 1’s top half (1-15 home, 1-25 neutral, 1-40 road). These Q1A wins are the elite of the elite—the more, the better. But it’s also important to surround your Quad 1 wins with good, quality Quad 2 wins (beating other decent teams, even if they aren’t tournament-level), as well as avoiding losses in Quad 3 and 4 (teams you should have no trouble beating—though these “bad” losses are never as emphasized as the “good” wins are).
3. Strength of schedule: Additionally, playing a difficult schedule and challenging yourself is something that the selection committee tends to reward. (And, inversely, easy schedules are very often punished.) Bill Self and Nate Oats have become masters of this; Kansas and Alabama are almost always in the top-10 for most difficult overall schedule, as well as non-conference schedule. This non-conference portion tends to be stressed more than the former, as your overall SOS is half a product of what conference you’re in—you don’t really have much control there. But the non-conference schedule, you do control, at least partially. If that number resides in the top-100, you’re more likely to be looked upon favorably. But if that number sits in the 300s instead… Just hope that you’re not on the bubble.
4. Road/neutral wins: Fun fact: Teams are not permitted to play in their home venue during the NCAA Tournament. Thus, every March Madness game that a team plays is played away from home. Showing the selection committee that you aren’t just a product of your own environment, and that you can go and win in neutral or unfriendly locations, as would be expected of a tournament team, is also critical. Just like Quad 1 and Quad 1A wins before—the more victories you’re able to rack up outside of your own arena, the better!
5. Quality metrics: The quality metrics (also frequently called “predictive” or “efficiency” metrics) are used to measure the inherent strength of your team by looking at how well you scored on your possessions, and how well you prevented the other team from scoring on theirs, adjusted for schedule difficulty. The three team-sheet-official quality metrics (BPI, KenPom, T-Rank), alongside NET, to an extent, do just this, and they give a feel for how “good” a team actually is. Problem is, these numbers don’t say anything about what you actually achieved—that’s what the résumé metrics do. As such, these numbers are not as emphasized as the résumé numbers, and are almost thrown out the window entirely when it comes to determining who the last few teams to earn at-large bids should be. We saw this lack of emphasis last year, when a Gonzaga team that ranked 8th in NET and top-11 in all three quality metrics was handed an 8-seed, creating a pretty unfavorable second-round matchup for 1-seed Houston, as well as when Memphis, who ranked 50th in NET and averaged a ranking of 53.0 across the three predictive measures, still earned a 5-seed because of their strong résumé metrics and quadrant splits. All that said, there are still times when the quality metrics are accounted for heavily, most often near the top of the bracket. You may recall in 2023 when Houston earned the #2 overall seed over Kansas, despite the Jayhawks having 10 more Quad 1 wins, as a result of the Cougars being #1 in NET and #1 in BPI and KenPom, as well as #2 in the now non-existent Sagarin (RIP). This is all to say that quality metrics are important, and the best way to inflate them is to beat every team you play by as many points as you can. Just be aware that, in general, they aren’t quite as emphasized as the previous team sheet areas that I touched on.
I hope that explanation provides a good overview for exactly what areas I look at every time I build a bracket! It’s all the same data that the selection committee looks at; the only thing that’s subjective here is how much I “feel” certain areas of the team sheet will be stressed over others, based on my understanding of how the committee operates.
All that finally out of the way, let’s get today’s Bauertology bracket and seed list! I’m hoping to get into the swing of producing two of these a week; expect new updates to start dropping on Fridays either at the conclusion of January or shortly after the start of February.
