Cracketology: Bracketing the Megaconferences

The ultimate "nerds in mom's basement", the NCAA Selection Committee

Photo by Drew Angerer | Getty Images

This week we're going to do something a little bit different and start with what usually comes at the end of these articles. Consider that the record for total bids earned by a single conference is 11 by the 2011 Big East, and on only three occasions has a league earned 9 bids (2012 Big East, 2017 & 2018 ACC). Now look at the bid totals we currently project for 2025:

Multibid Leagues

SEC: 12 

Big 10: 9

Big 12: 9

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ACC: 4

Big East: 4

Mountain West: 3

Missouri Valley: 2

WCC: 2

A few things stood out to me looking at this. The first is the sheer difficulty to bracket these teams. Typically, a league should have no more than one protected seed per region and no more than two teams overall per region. With eight teams currently in the top-16 protected seed spots, the SEC shatters the first and with three leagues all having 9 teams, the second is a much harder guideline to follow.

The next thing that jumped out was when counting multibid leagues, it is always "conference champion plus number of at-large bids." Which means the SEC, Big 10, and Big 12 are currently taking up 27 of the 37 at-large bids. That simply doesn't leave a lot of room for leagues like the Big East (3.9 average at-large bids since 2014) or ACC (5.6 average at-large bids since 2014), much less anyone else.

There are a few other rules the Selection Committee tries to follow. First, they avoid first-round intra-conference matchups. Second, they avoid rematching non-conference opponents that played in the regular season in the first round and teams that played in the NCAA first round the year before in the first round. So what did all this consolidation look like? Here are a few of the issues I ran into this week:

The Protected Seeds

Placing the top SEC teams feels like a game of Pong. I made it my goal to keep them apart until the Elite 8. What helped currently was that there are 2 SEC teams on each line of the S-Curve. The 1-seeds all went to their closest geographic region when their spot came up, then it was a matter of placing the SEC 2-seeds in regions that did not have SEC 1-seeds, the SEC 3-seeds in regions that did have SEC 1-seeds (so the 2's and 3's wouldn't play in the Sweet 16), and finally placing the SEC 4-seeds in the regions with the non-SEC 1-seeds.

This created another problem, however. When I got to the 4-line, there were two SEC and two Big 10 teams. While there were just four protected Big 10 teams, in order to place the SEC 4-seeds away from the SEC 1-seeds it meant putting Ole Miss and Mississippi State in Iowa State and Duke's regions. That left one of Oregon or Illinois having to go to the Atlanta region where Purdue was the 2-seed. Ultimately I put Oregon as the 4-seed in Atlanta because they were only scheduled to play Purdue twice and the SEC is already creating multiple potential Elite 8 matchups with their protected seeds so doing it once for the Big 10 seemed okay.

The Middle Seeds

These were a little easier, though having two 4-seeds and two 5-seeds from the Big 10 meant keeping those teams apart. Placing the 6-seeds, the biggest issue I had was trying to remember if Texas A&M and Arizona are in the same conference. Everybody's shuffling!

The 7/10 matchups also presented a headache. There were three SEC teams placed into 7/10 games. They couldn't play each other, but because there were two SEC teams on the 2-seed line it meant creating a potential SEC/SEC second round game. As a Marquette fan old enough to remember Marquette playing Syracuse to get to the Sweet 16 in 2011, I sent Vanderbilt to Cleveland opposite Florida. This made sure that if the favored seed won (7-Clemson over 10-Vanderbilt) the intra-conference matchup wouldn't take place and Florida/Vanderbilt only play once in SEC play so this matchup is okay, if not ideal. The 8/9 games were surprisingly easy because there were 6 conferences represented. Keeping Gonzaga and St. Mary's apart was easy because they were on the same line, so it was just keeping UCLA and Ohio State apart.

The Bubble

Perhaps the biggest difficulty was here. The first problem was having two Big 12 teams in Dayton, so I needed to keep them apart. However I also had two Big 12 teams on the 6-seed lines opposite the 11-seed play-in games, which mean the play-in winners could not go to play 6-seeds West Virginia or Arizona. When bracketing play-in games, the play-in winners are always placed first to avoid scheduling conflicts. That didn't work as well here. The problem was that Indiana and Wake Forest could not play each other and one of them had to play into Louisville. That meant either Indiana (played Louisville in Atlantis) or Wake Forest (fellow ACC school) had to play into the Cardinals. There was no way to bracket this without violating NCAA policies. In this case, I put Indiana/Arizona State into Louisville, though I suspect the actual committee would consider moving West Virginia down to the 7-line and St. John's up to the 6-line to accommodate all this, which would let Indiana/Arizona State play into St. John's and remove the conflicts.

Between the bracketing and the crazy basketball finishes last night (Xavier/St. John's, the SEC insanity, and SDSU/Air Force which came down to a buzzer-beater keeping the Aztecs in the field) here are the results: