…Is this thing on?
Yes, it’s well past time for me to wake up from my annual seven-month hibernation, what with the new Division I men’s college basketball season set to officially tip off from Rome of all places on Sunday morning. (The alma mater of the current pope vs. America’s most well-known Catholic school, right on the doorstep of the Holy See itself? And they say cinema is dead.)
It’s a new era for college basketball and bracketology alike, one that I admittedly enter with pessimism at heart. NIL and the transfer portal were already a complete mess; now we’ve got ceaseless back-and-forths about who’s eligible and who’s not thrown into the mix. (I’m not entirely convinced that I couldn’t suit up for Mississippi Valley State tomorrow if I found the right attorney and judge willing to hear my case—and take my money.) It was bad enough when it was just coaches deliberately misinterpreting NCAA rules to get former professional athletes to dress for them. Now we’ve got guys threatening legal action against their own coaches if they’ve been told they can’t play? We’ve lost the plot entirely.
Only complicating matters on the bracketology side is the NCAA Tournament field officially expanding from 68 to 76 teams this season, despite just about every college basketball fan on earth vehemently pushing back against the idea. But, hey, if completely sacrificing what fans want means making the NCAA’s pockets a little heavier, then damn it all to hell!
Like most, I have been against the idea of expansion from the very onset. I mean, 68 teams was just perfect. Tuesday and Wednesday’s play-in games served as the ideal appetizer for the entree of madness on Thursday and Friday, with the distribution of seeds working swimmingly to produce the right mix of bracket-breaking upsets. I’m not so sure that this will still be the case. With Tuesday and Wednesday now having six play-in games each, it feels less like an appetizer and more like another heaping scoop of a bloated main course. And with each of the eight new tournament spots set to go to at-larges, that means more mediocre Power Conference teams will enter the fray, rather than potential giant killers from smaller leagues. (This change will also effectively shift the automatic bids below the at-large cut line down a seed line or two, making the first-round upsets we crave that much harder to pull off.)
Perhaps my worries will be for naught come tournament time and the games are actually played, but I can’t shake this feeling that our cherished March Madness is well on its way to becoming a thoroughly diluted version of the timeless product we once adored.
So, yes, I’m deeply concerned about the direction our beloved sport is going in. But here at Bauertology, we press on nonetheless. What other choice do we have?
So let’s roll back the concerns for a moment and get into the exciting new stuff going on here at Bauertology this season! There are quite a few changes to take note of, so I’ve separated them into each of the bolded headers below.
New graphics! (Kinda!)
With a new era of postseason basketball comes an updated look to the Bauertology bracket and seed list graphics! …Sort of. You’ll see below that the new digs aren’t all that different from before—same fonts, same logos, same colored boxes, etc. What’s actually different is my process for putting the graphics together. Previously, I updated everything from bracket-to-bracket directly in Photoshop. It made for a pretty tedious process every time that I wanted to post a new bracket, sometimes taking close to two hours, if enough stuff changed from the prior rendition. And with the tournament field now expanded to include eight more teams, that’s eight more names, logos, and colors I would have to update manually (on top of comparing that many more resumes beforehand). So, to make wiser use of my time, I went ahead and created a template in Excel that utilizes XLOOKUPs to make logos magically appear by typing team names into cells. Then all I have to do is fill cell colors using the dropper tool, export the template into Photoshop, and presto, new bracket graphic pumped out in under 20 minutes. So much easier, and I mostly get to maintain the same style that I already had. Yippee!
There are a couple things I had to cut to make this work, namely the “Last Four Byes” and “Last Four In” sections, as well as the number of bids received by each conference. But making a separate section for Last Four Byes/Last Four In hardly makes sense anymore with the number of at-large play-in participants expanding from 4 to 12, and why even bother addressing the bids received by each league when it’s just going to be double digits for all the P5-ers and maybe two or three at most for everyone else? It’d just be a depressing sight to see.
So, yeah, some changes, for better and for worse. But the biggest change of all is that this new format is going to save me hours upon hours of time in the long run. So it’s very clearly worth it in my book!
Updated Resources page!
The Bauertology Resources page is one of the things that I take the most pride in bracketology-wise. Remembering all the principles and procedures for fitting teams into the bracket can be a monster of a headache for bracketologists both new and old. Having all those principles in one neat place—as well as tools that cut out much of the legwork for you—is another time-saver to nth degree. Thankfully, I know the right people to make those things happen.
The new Resources page simply wouldn’t be possible without the help of Grantley CBB (formerly known as AI Bracketology), whose deep knowledge of coding and HTML has been an invaluable resource in the past and will continue to be for years to come. Together, we worked out a brand new search tool that simply allows you to type a team name and instantly receive the distances from every tournament site in mileage order, as well as opponents played during the regular season to avoid when bracketing your field—a stark improvement from the clunky tables I had been using before. I’ve already gotten to put this tool to use when putting together my preseason bracket below; hopefully other bracketologists get the same value out of it as I already have!
What happened to BRCT?
Those with a keen eye may have noticed that this website’s number of header tabs is one fewer than it was last year. The reason is this: For the time being, I’ve decided to retire BRCT.
For those unaware, BRCT (the Bauertology Resume Comparison Tool, pronounced “bracket”) is a resume metric that I myself developed, in hopes of more accurately attributing a single score to teams’ tournament resumes, based on the quality of their opponents, their margins of victory or defeat, and the location of where the games were played. (You can read more about it both HERE and HERE, if you have the time or care.) While I was thrilled with the initial positive reception of BRCT… I’ve become less thrilled with the tool’s results over time. When I first started working on BRCT, WAB (Wins Above Bubble) had yet to become an official team sheet metric. Now that it has, I’ve been able to track how BRCT has measured team resumes alongside WAB. And, simply put, WAB has done a far better job of measuring what I was hoping BRCT could measure. Just one example of an issue that BRCT doesn’t account for well (that WAB does) is the gap in schedule difficulty between teams. Take last year’s 28-1 Miami (OH) team; with one of the weaker schedules in D-I, they placed 58th in the final BRCT rankings, below teams that weren’t especially close to the bubble conversation like Seton Hall (45th) and Boise State (48th). WAB, on the other hand, accurately realizes that it’s extremely tough to win 28 of 29 games, even against an easy schedule like the one Miami had, as the RedHawks ranked a respectable 37th in Wins Above Bubble. My own tool seemingly punishing good mid-majors who got frozen out by Power Conference scheduling dynamics feels like such a betrayal of what I wanted BRCT to achieve in the first place, and I simply can’t bear to live with it. In summation, it seems to me that BRCT is just an inferior version of a different tool that already does its job really well and is officially used by the tournament selection committee, so why bother continuing with it?
That all said, I’m not yet committed to the idea of permanently retiring BRCT. I may still tinker with the formulas in hopes of improving its big weaknesses. (Sure would help a ton if the NCAA would publish the actual NET numbers for each team, instead of just the ranking.) But, at least for now, BRCT has been laid to rest.
More on the horizon…
BRCT may be gone for now, but a new feature to the website will be taking its stead here shortly. Not having to worry about updating my own metric daily means that I can instead use that time to introduce something I’ve long wanted: Bauertology Team Profiles!
As I’ve done more and more bracketology throughout the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that keeping it simple when comparing team resumes for tournament spots is the best course of action. Massive credit must be given to the likes of Warren Nolan and Bracketologists.com, which serve as extremely helpful resources for gathering huge amounts of data—including the results of every single game played—in a format resembling the selection committee’s very own team sheets of old. But I’ve also come to realize that these resources may very well be doing too much. Put yourself in the shoes of a selection committee member in the days leading up to Selection Sunday; with all the principles and voting and deliberations being had by the 11 other committee members, are you really going to have the time to discuss every single data point on every single team sheet over the course of five days? Absolutely not—that would be a ludicrous ask of any individual, especially now that eight more tournament spots need to be filled.
In coming to this realization that simplicity is the best path, I devised my own team profiles in a Google Sheet last year (examples of which you can view in this post from January) that pare things down to the essentials: quadrants, metrics, strength of schedule numbers, and pertinent records (like overall, road, and neutral). Relying on these simpler, more succinct profiles for my own bracketology last season seemed to work wonders, as I finished 14th out of 290 submissions to the Bracket Matrix: my highest placement since 2022.
So now I deliver these quick-and-dirty team profiles to you! Once again working with Grantley CBB, we’ve put together a tool where you can compare as many as eight resumes at once by simply searching a team name and adding it to the comparison area. Here’s what the tool looks like (using last year’s numbers):
No, these profiles don’t provide the same nuance of individual game results that the aforementioned Warren Nolan or Bracketologists.com may provide, some of which could genuinely be critical data points in the eyes of the selection committee. But they get the essentials across in a pure and easy manner, hopefully making comparing resumes a much faster and still-accurate process for you, just as it has for me. You can expect this tool to go live and begin being updated daily sometime in December, once the NCAA starts publishing its NET rankings.
When can we expect more Bauertology posts in the future?
This preseason bracket/explainer post is probably it for the rest of 2026. There’s just not much to do on the bracketology front until NET numbers and metrics start to make sense and paint a clearer postseason picture come early 2027. But once the calendar flips, you can expect Monday and Friday bracket updates every week, as well as new Bauer’s Bubble Watch articles post-Super Bowl, as has always been the case. But, in the meantime, feel free to reach out here in the website’s comments or through my Twitter if you ever want to pick my brain about something, or if you just wanna talk hoops!
That FINALLY brings us to the official Bauertology preseason bracket and seed list, which you can see below. My disclaimer for this year’s preseason picks is the same as it is every year: Don’t take it too seriously. My choices are based on nothing but a combination of metric projections found in the likes of KenPom and T-Rank, as well as my own gut feelings. We’ve got no real data to build on yet, so it’s mainly just an exercise to get used to the new bracket-building process and have fun with. Don’t feel slighted if your team is lower than you like or even absent entirely. They’ve got 30+ games to prove my prognostications wrong!
It’s a wonderful thing that daily college basketball is back in our lives. Let’s enjoy it!
