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Bubble Watch 2025: Men's NCAA tournament locks by conference

The metrics continue to fall across the board for Porter Moser's Oklahoma Sooners, who have now lost 10 straight SEC games. Matt Pendleton-Imagn Images

As we get closer to Selection Sunday on March 16, the Bubble Watch picture for the 2025 NCAA tournament is coming into clearer view, but we still have plenty of questions around men's college basketball teams at the margins.

The SEC is a behemoth, for instance, with nine teams tracking as tourney locks, or close to it. But this is a conference that could send as many as 12 (or even 13!) teams to the Big Dance, and there's a five-team group -- Oklahoma, Texas, Vanderbilt, Georgia and Arkansas -- vying for those last spots that not everyone can claim.

There's also the Big 12, with its quartet of teams -- BYU, West Virginia, Cincinnati and Kansas State -- fighting over what might be the conference's seventh or eighth (and final) spots in the tourney field.

And how many teams will the ACC send? The outlooks for bubble teams Wake Forest, North Carolina and Pitt are all very much in flux.

That's all before we get into the mid-majors on the bubble -- a list that includes Gonzaga, though the Bulldogs still control their own destiny. At the same time, more unheralded teams such as UC San Diego and Drake are giving their fans a lot to root for, and perhaps winning over the selection committee as well.

It's all setting up for a wild five weeks of college basketball, and we'll be tracking the changes as some teams solidify their bids, while others see their postseason dreams slip away.

As a reminder, we'll break teams down 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 either 25% to 69% tourney odds per 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 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: 29 total teams
Should be in: 5 teams
Work to do: 24 teams

Let's get to the rundown of teams -- conference by conference -- in order of which conferences project to get the most NCAA bids. 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

SEC

Locks (95% tourney chance):