BRACKETOLOGY 2018

Predicting the NCAA Tournament requires knowledge about the selection process, historical decisions made by the committee, the criteria that the committee uses, each team’s statistics, and a little bit of luck. Aside from a team’s record and conference standing, the NCAA selection committee tend to stress quality wins, non-conference strength of schedule, how teams performed with and without injured key players, and RPI as well. Once the committee has selected the top 68 teams for the tournament, they rank each team from 1-68 and give them a seed. Finally, each seed is placed in one of four parts of the bracket, the East, Midwest, South, and West respectively. This stage is largely determined by geographic location but the committee also does not place too many teams from the same conference in the same bracketed region. When both of those criteria are not a factor, the committee places teams on the bracket by their rank, for example, they will not put the best 1 seed, the best 2 seed, and the best 3 seed in the same region. The following bracket shows my predictions for the NCAA Tournament if it started right now. I ranked and seeded each team using the committee’s criteria and my criteria.

KEY:

1, 2, 3, etc. = Seeds

Blue Text = Current conference leader or automatic bid

Last Modified: March 9, 2018 at 11:48 AM PST

EAST REGION

MIDWEST REGION

SOUTH REGION

WEST REGION