Cracketology: 1-Seeds and Mormons

 

Florida fans are throwing up their hands at their drop from the 1-line

Photo from ESPN.com

When Houston beat Texas Tech last night, there was a bit of a social media uproar from Florida fans. The Gators have generally pushed up to the 1-seed line for the past couple weeks, but Houston's win has many bracketologists (myself included) moving the Cougars up to the 1-seed line. Florida fans point to their overall record, resume average, and monster wins over Auburn and Tennessee to make their claim. They feel they have a 1-seed resume. And they are right.

Historically, no team that has had an average below 5.0 in all of the team sheet metrics has been anything other than a 1-seed, and Florida's 3.7 average as of late last night fit that bill. The problem for the Gators is that this year, there are six teams that fit that profile. Look at the resumes:

Last year, North Carolina was the last 1-seed with a 7.5 RAP, while Kansas had a 5.4 in 2023. This year, there are six teams that are better than either of those teams, but only four can land as 1-seeds. While Auburn's 14 wins in Q1 and 19 in Q1+2 stand out, the others are all very comparable. We did move Houston to the last 1-seed this morning because their 16 wins in Q1+2 are now on par with Auburn and second only to Alabama. Compared to any other year, 2025 effectively has six 1-seeds.

The impact of that is not having many deserving teams for the 2-seed line. Certainly the bottom of this group is more than worthy of being there, but no other teams has a metric average below Michigan State's 10.5 (typically a 2-seed should be between 5.0 and 9.0). Overall, this feels like one of the strongest fields in years, however. The concentration of teams at the top is the reason teams like Michigan State, Texas A&M, Wisconsin, and Iowa State don't have those typical 2-seed averages. When the best average you can have in any individual metric is 7, it's hard to get an average below 9.

Overall, the field seems incredibly strong, especially through the first seven seed lines. The teams on the 5-line all would be worthy of a protected seed in just about any other year, and the differences between teams on the 4/5 lines like Purdue and Missouri is very slim compared to teams on the 6/7 lines like Oregon and Marquette. Get ready for a fantastic March.

BYU's rise up the S-Curve has made life difficult on bracketologists

Photo by Jamie Squire | Getty Images

Further down the field, BYU is leading to all kinds of headaches for bracketologists and will likely do the same for the Selection Committee in a few weeks. As a Mormon university, BYU does not play games on Sundays. For bracketing purposes, this rules out a number of sites and regions because there are 4 sites that will play round of 32 games on Sunday in the first weekend and two regionals that are set to play on Sunday for the Elite Eight.

BYU can only play the first weekend in Providence, Lexington, Wichita, or Denver and can only play in the East and West regions. BYU has moved up from being a bubble team initially to a 10-seed, and today we were debating them and Memphis for the last 7-seed/first 8-seed. The problem is the number of places they can play as those seeds. We initially had them at 28 overall, which puts them into a 7/10 game in a 2-seed pod. However all four of the 2-seed pods would play on a Sunday one of the first two weekends. The NCAA will always move BYU down for bracketing purposes (they were moved down to a 6-seed last year) and that was the move we made, but dropping them to 29 and putting them in an 8/9 game (1-seed pod) only gave one option, which was to pair them against fellow Big 12 school Houston, and the Selection Committee tries to avoid first weekend matchups between league mates when possible.

The alternative was to drop them from a 7-seed to an 11-seed, which would've opened up either of the Providence pods, but as the Committee has had second weekend matchups between league opponents that only played once in the regular season (think Marquette/Syracuse in 2011) we sent them opposite Houston. Rest assured, the Cougars will provide no shortage of difficulties when it comes to bracketing next month.

Let's look at the updated S-Curve and bracket:

Multiple Bid Leagues

SEC: 11

Big 10: 10

Big 12: 8

ACC: 4

Big East: 4

Mountain West: 4

Big West: 2

WCC: 2