There are about three weeks to go until Selection Sunday on March 16, and the Bubble Watch picture for the 2025 men's NCAA tournament continues to sharpen as 32 teams have achieved at least a 95% chance to make the tournament in ESPN Analytics' tourney forecast model, while seven others are in solid shape (70-95%). But that leaves 22 teams sitting between 25% and 70% odds, their fates currently unknown.
This weekend gave us clues about which direction those odds will point. But the biggest matchups of all will come when the new week begins. Nebraska desperately needs a win against Michigan on Monday; Tuesday features West Virginia-TCU, Cincinnati-Baylor, Georgia-Florida and San Diego State-New Mexico; and watch out Wednesday for huge battles between Arkansas and Texas, Ohio State and USC, and Oklahoma and Kentucky. It's not a stretch to say that the results of each of these games could leave us with a very different Bubble Watch landscape this time next week.
As a reminder, we'll 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 failsafe 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: 30 teams
The Bubble: 30 total teams
Should be in: 8 teams
Work to do: 22 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 | Others
