The 2024-25 men's college basketball season is in full swing, so there's no better time to launch ESPN's official Bubble Watch 2025 ahead of the NCAA tournament than right now.
We're looking at about 40 days until the power conference tournaments tip off -- even sooner for the mid-majors -- and only a little longer than that before Selection Sunday on March 16.
As usual for Bubble Watch, we'll break teams down by conference into categories based on their projected NCAA tournament status. This year, however, we'll be largely basing the categories on ESPN Analytics' BPI forecast, which gives each team a probability to make the tourney after simulating the remainder of the season 10,000 times.
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. 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.
Bubble Watch will be updated continuously from now until March 16. Here is our current projection of the bubble:
Locks: 18 teams
The Bubble: 47 total teams
Should be in: 17 teams
Work to do: 30 teams
So, let's go 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 Time. 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.
Jump to a conference:
SEC | Big Ten
Big 12 | ACC | Big East
High Mid-Majors | Low Mid-Majors
