Selection Sunday is a week away, and conference tournaments are getting underway, with the first automatic bids up for grabs this weekend. Drake, for instance, punched its ticket by winning Arch Madness on Sunday, leaving Bubble Watch by literally locking up an NCAA bid.
As of now, according to ESPN Analytics' tournament forecast model, 32 teams have achieved at least a 95% chance to make the tournament, while 10 others are in solid shape (70-95%). But that leaves 18 teams sitting between 25% and 70% odds, their fates currently unknown.
Let's break down teams by conference into categories based on their projected NCAA tournament status.
Teams with Lock status have at least a 95% chance to make the tournament, according to the BPI forecast. (Yes, this means that 5% of the time, a team marked as a lock will miss the tourney. We set the threshold there as a nod to the traditional standard for significance testing.)
A team marked Should Be In has a BPI probability from 70% to 94%. These are teams that, most likely, will get into the field of 68, though their fates are not completely assured yet.
And a team with the Work To Do tag has anywhere from 25% to 69% tourney odds per the BPI, or is featured in ESPN's most recent Bracketology column by Joe Lunardi -- who, let's be honest, probably knows better than the algorithm -- or has at least a 10% chance to make the tourney conditional on not getting an automatic bid. We'll mark these Bracketology teams with an asterisk. (This is our fail-safe for catching teams that the BPI might be too low on.) The percentages will be more accurate the closer we get to Selection Sunday, as teams' bodies of work become more solidified.
One other note: The ESPN Analytics model is a predictive forecast, meaning it is not representative of whether a team would make the tournament if its season ended today but rather gives each team a probability to make the tourney after simulating the remainder of the season 10,000 times.
Here is our current projection of the bubble:
Auto-bids available (conference tournament champs): 31 teams
At-large bids available: 37 teams
Locks: 32 teams
The Bubble: 28 total teams
Should be in: 10 teams
Work to do: 18 teams
Here's the rundown of teams -- conference by conference -- in order of which conferences projects to get the most NCAA bids. And we've listed expected number of bids for each of the power conferences. The teams are listed in order within each category based on their chances to get a tourney bid.
Notes: All times are Eastern. SOR = strength of record. SOS = strength of schedule. NET rankings = The NCAA's official evaluation tool, which is the recommended rating for the committee to look at. SRS = Simple Rating System. WAB = Wins Above Bubble, a team's extra wins beyond what a typical bubble team would have against its schedule.
Jump to a conference:
SEC | Big Ten
Big 12 | ACC | Big East
Mid-majors | Others
