Y’all.
I had this very stupid idea a while back. I forget when I first noticed that some people were putting out NCAA tournament bracket projections before Christmas. But I remember looking at one of them and seeing one of the top seeds with a horrific loss already and there they were, with one of the worst losses in the country at the time, holding a top 3 seed in their region, because, I dunno, vibes, I guess? This might have been in 2023-24 when Michigan State lost to James Madison to start the season.
You can’t do a pre-Thanksgiving bracketology with that on the record and still keep the Spartans as a single digit seed, not if you’re adhering to the same bracket principles you’d use on February 28th.
Anyway.
I ran with this stupid idea last year, and it was fun, and I got the point out of my system, and I thought that was going to be that. Then the NCAA expanded the basketball tournament to 76 teams, creating seven new at-large bids (yeah, eight spots, but the Pac-12 gets their auto-bid back), and so now the cut line way off from where it used to be so there’s less urgency than ever to figure out who is or is not in the tourney. You would think, wouldn’t you, that there is even less reason to start warbling about LAST FOUR IN and FIRST FOUR OUT and so on when no one has even played five games of a 30+ game season yet.
AND YET, THERE’S ESPN’S JOE LUNARDI, FIRING OFF HOT NEW BRACKETS ON NOVEMBER 10TH, BARELY MORE THAN A FULL WEEK INTO THE SEASON.
You know what really grinds my gears about this? Back in JULY OF 2024, the NCAA announced that they’re adding a Wins Above Bubble metric to the Team Sheets that the tournament selection committee uses. That means that WAB was in use for the 2025 tournament AND the 2026 tournament. That’s why when I did this ridiculous exercise last year, I used WAB and NOTHING ELSE to make my point. But here’s Joe Lunardi, on Al Gore’s Internet, in NOVEMBER OF 2026, acting like this news bulletin just came across his Morse Code wire:
The three most important letters in college basketball are no longer N.E.T. Though NET rankings remain at the center of NCAA tournament selection and seeding, the men’s committee has a new favorite toy: W.A.B., short for wins above bubble, and we should get ready to hear about it early and often this season.
TWO TOURNAMENTS HAVE BEEN SELECTED, SEEDED, AND BRACKETED WITH THIS METRIC, YOU ABSOLUTE NIMROD. That’s why you only got 55 teams in last year’s tournament seeded correctly and finished 37th over at Bracket Matrix. That’s why you’re ranked #104 in the last five years of brackets out of just the 200 people who have been projecting brackets for three or more years. Sweet Christmas, Joe, get with the program.
I was going to do this blog post anyway when I saw that Lunardi moved Marquette from a #9 seed in his preseason projection (this is fine, it’s just another season preview packagae item, I have no problem with completely guessing at a bracket), to a #7 seed even though the Golden Eagles were sitting at #92 over at BartTorvik.com with a WAB that is only mathematically north of 0 through two games. SPOILER ALERT: #92 is not going to be good enough to get you into the tournament. This means that Lunardi is GUESSING that Marquette is better than he originally thought and moving them up as opposed to crunching the numbers and seeding teams based on who they beat and where did they beat them. A guessing game bracket when we have actual results is of no use to anyone, and now I have to question the validity of the bracket that you’re putting together in February.
THEN I saw that he was making a big deal about how important WAB is, and between two tournaments behind the times AND not actually using WAB to build his bracket — again, Marquette was #92 yesterday and they’re #96 today when I have time to actually do this — I lost my mind and so here we are. A 76 team field through results as of Tuesday, November 10th, built entirely out of WAB as calculated by BartTorvik.com:
#1 Seeds
Florida
Michigan State
Memphis
Minnesota
#2 Seeds
East Texas A&M
UCLA
Kansas
Texas Tech
#3 Seeds
Valparaiso
Virginia
BYU
Saint Louis
#4 Seeds
Connecticut
Gonzaga
Notre Dame
Virginia Tech
#5 Seeds
Nevada
Nebraska
South Dakota State
Indiana
#6 Seeds
USC
Vanderbilt
Georgetown
Houston
#7 Seeds
San Diego State
Pittsburgh
Wright State
Seton Hall
#8 Seeds
Davidson
Miami (OH)
North Carolina
DePaul
#9 Seeds
Boise State
High Point
Furman
North Texas
#10 Seeds
Arizona State
Richmond
UNC Wilmington
UMass Lowell
#11 Seeds
Santa Clara
Alabama
Bowling Green
Texas State
#12 Seeds
Colorado State
NC State
UCF
Pacific
#13 Seeds
Stanford
Ohio
Murray State
Oregon State/San Francisco
#14 Seeds
Boston College/Utah
Xavier/Rhode Island
George Washington/Akron
Clemson/Oregon
#15 Seeds
Old Dominion
Mississippi/Wisconsin
Kennesaw State/Quinnipiac
South Carolina State/Utah Valley
#16 Seeds
Southern Utah/Penn
Jacksonville/Grambling State
North Alabama/Boston University
Lindenwood/Le Moyne
Yes, that’s right, running the show this way means we do not get to an Opening Round game until the #13 seeds, and the last at-large bid Opening Round game is actually a #15 seed game. That’s what happens when you use WAB at this point of the year, you get East Texas A&M as the fifth best team in the country, Valparaiso at #9, Nevada at #17, and South Dakota State at #19, and that throws ALL of this off and shoves the Opening Round at-large contests waaaaaaay down the field.
Yes, Old Dominion is seeded better than both Mississippi and Wisconsin in the WAB list, so they are correctly placed here as the last automatic qualifier that doesn’t have to play an opening round game. I’m not sure how the committee is going to seed the six at-large and six automatic Opening Round games, but instead of giving Wisconsin a shot at a #13 seed when they are the last at-large into the field, I just paired them two at a time. Oregon State is #52, San Francisco is #53, and so on. Is that fair to USF, as in this arrangement there will be five teams seeded worse than them advancing to a first round game? Probably not, but it’s more fair than giving the Badgers a shot at rising two seed lines otherwise.
I just want to say this part out loud: Joe Lunardi made a big stupid deal about how important WAB is now, and then he put Minnesota, the 4th best WAB team in the country, in Next Four Out. Not First Four Out, he has them seven spots outside the field on Tuesday morning when they have one win from Monday (at Cincinnati, +0.7 WAB) that’s so valuable it would have them at #15 in the country all by itself before you tack on their other two wins.
Buddy. What are you doing here?
If you are being honest about what “IF THE TOURNAMENT STARTED TODAY!” should look like when you publish a bracketology before the NCAA publishes the NET, much less before Christmas, much less before January 1st, this is what it should look like. You can’t have Texas and their sub-100 WAB as a #3 seed. You can’t have Duke as a #1 seed when as of Tuesday morning, their WAB was about the same as Wisconsin…. and as of Wednesday morning, it’s in the negatives and down in the 120s.
If you’re basing it on “who did you beat and where did you beat them?” and not “But I like this team!” this right here, as listed above, is the bracket that you get.
Accept no substitutes.
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