Regular season? I hardly know ‘er!
From here on out, it’s nothing but postseason, baby. Five conference tournaments have already crowned a champion. Twenty-six more need to do so between right now and the unveiling of the final 68-team field at 4 p.m. MT on Sunday, March 15.
Savor these precious finals days; they’ll fly by before you know it.
Today’s Bauertology bracket marks the final edition before the start of tournament play in the major conferences. Automatic bids have already been handed out to our five aforementioned tourney victors (Tennessee State, Northern Iowa, High Point, Queens, and North Dakota State), as well as NEC finalist LIU, due to championship game opponent Mercyhurst being ineligible. That leaves us with 62 more bids to figure out in the interim, at least until tonight, when the SoCon and Sun Belt name their champions to reduce that number to 60.
As was the case in Friday’s update, I believe that the top 40 or so teams in the seed list are pretty much secured, and that their tournament spot could only be threatened by an overwhelming presence of bid thieves, such as what we saw in 2024, when five at-larges were nabbed out of existence. I’m counting on 2-3 this year; the Mountain West, Atlantic 10, and MAC seem to be the most likely culprits, given that Utah State, Saint Louis, and Miami (OH) all ought to be dancing no matter what.
And as opposed to 2024, when it was sad to see strong teams like Seton Hall and Indiana State get knocked out of the field by no fault of their own, I’m all for some bid thieves in 2026. None of these jerks hovering right around the cut line deserve a spot. So many different bubble teams had, quote-unquote, “must-win games” on Friday or Saturday—SMU, Virginia Tech, California, Indiana, New Mexico, Auburn, Cincinnati, Seton Hall, etc.—and they all lost. Well, not all of ’em—VCU’s win at Dayton on Friday night, alongside the rest of the bubble imploding, makes the Rams look like a solid pick for the postseason. And how about Stanford? I didn’t even have the Cardinal on my Bubble Watch page in last Wednesday’s update; now they’re in my field altogether following two road victories over Notre Dame and NC State. Pretty easy to move up like that when literally every other bubble team loses!
So yeah, give me some bid thieves. The résumés of these bubble teams are just so bafflingly bad, so much so that Indiana with a record of 6-13 across Quads 1 and 2 stands as my first team out of the field, Auburn at 16-15 overall is still within the First Four Out, and both Cincinnati and Oklahoma at 17-14 overall slot inside the first eight teams outside the dance. I mentioned on Friday that I had just two teams still “under consideration” beyond my first eight out; that number has grown to seven because of how badly the bubble has collapsed upon itself.
But it’s not all doom and gloom! The teams at the top of the bracket are starting to mold into their final resting place seed-wise. We finally see Florida surpassing UConn for the last 1 seed—a result that felt inevitable but had yet to coalesce under the right circumstances. Well, the Huskies losing at 11-19 Marquette while the Gators picked up their 11th consecutive victory and 11th such in Quad 1 proved to be the circumstances necessary for such a shift.
Beyond that, Nebraska seems to be locked in to nothing worse than a 3 seed after holding off a feisty Iowa on Sunday, Gonzaga moves up to the 3 line with Purdue and Texas Tech both stumbling this weekend—a position that the Zags can basically lock down by winning out the WCC tourney—and St. John’s moves up to a 5 seed as a consequence of claiming the Big East regular season title, with a helpful home loss from Tennessee serving as the catalyst.
The rest of the bracket is yours to explore! For conference automatic bids still unclaimed, I’m continuing to use the highest remaining team in the BRCT rankings from each league, until that title victory auto-bid has indeed been solidified. (Also, welcome back to the field, Utah Valley! The Wolverines were granted their injunction to play in the WAC tournament on Friday, meaning they slot back inside the Bauertology field as BRCT’s WAC team of choice.)
Just six days left between now and the big day! I’ll be looking to ramp up the Bauertology coverage as a result. Expect your typical Bauer’s Bubble Watch update on Wednesday (as well as a short one on Saturday morning, if I have the time on Friday to write it), a brand-new bracket on Friday, and the return of Bauertology Live on Saturday afternoon, where I scrub through my entire seed list top to bottom, live tweeting as I do so from my Bauertology Twitter page. It’s always a blast when I do it every year, so make sure to check it out!
