Bauertology: 3/12/26

Aha! Surprised ya, didn’t I? A new Bauertology bracket and seed list on a Thursday instead of a Friday—practically unheard of!

Well, there’s a reason: I’m hardly going to have any time for bracket-building today, as my real world job may require me to work for about 14 hours straight. Plus, it seems a bit pointless to me to post a new bracket on Friday, then completely tear it down on Saturday when I undergo Bauertology Live over on the ol’ Twitter page, rebuilding my seed list from scratch one final time as the selection committee starts to wrap up its own seeding process.

So today marks the last traditional Bauertology update of 2026! I’ll have Bauertology Live on Saturday, then use that to craft a final bracket for Sunday, posted just before the Selection Show with Sunday’s championship results accounted for bid-wise.

And I’m telling ya—it’s beyond disgusting in Bubble Land. You already knew that, there’s no way you couldn’t, every bracketologist and their mother has been bantering about how bad this bubble is for weeks! And it just keeps getting worse. The entirety of my Next Four Out is already done playing for the year before Thursday even arrived; they all essentially need to hope and pray that the selection committee sees something in their résumés that I’m missing. Three of the teams in my First Four Out can still play their way into the field, at least. That includes Oklahoma, who, just yesterday, I considered a fringe inclusion at best on Bauer’s Bubble Watch. Now they’re three spots removed from the field altogether! This is not normal!

It is also not normal to have a 17-15 team inside your bracket. But I do, as Auburn successfully fended off Mississippi State on Wednesday. I really thought I would be done with the Tigers forever after they got blasted at Alabama to end the regular season, but this constant faceplanting elsewhere in Bubbleville forbids it. Hell, I even have ’em ahead of Texas and SMU now, since both of those teams’ résumés are even nastier! I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that Auburn will be in the field after all IF they beat Tennessee in Thursday’s quarterfinals. They’d be 18-16 at worst at that point—thoroughly nauseating, but perhaps good enough for a bid in this dirty, rotten bubble. (Can we please get some bid thieves up in here already?)

So, yeah, bear with me as we wade through these final couple days. We’ll start to see a few more changes in the 1-7 seed lines too now that those teams are getting in on conference tournament action. Very much looking forward to live tweeting my close-to-final seed list on Saturday—hope you’ll all join me for that!