Month: March 2024

2024 Tournament Preview

The 2024 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament continues an 85-year streak that there has been at least one team making their tournament debut. This year’s virgin team is the Stetson University Hatters from Deland, Florida, representing the Atlantic Sun conference.

Conference tournament upsets resulted in an unprecedented number of ‘Bubble-Buster’ teams. Analysts feel that six teams from multi-bid conferences earned an automatic berth when they otherwise would not have made the tournament. This means that those six conferences received an ‘extra’ invitation, stealing a bid from an otherwise higher rated team. Those bubble-busters caused the ‘Last Four In’ – the final at-large invitees – to move up to the number 10 seed line. This is the first time the First Four Round contains games between number 10 seeds.

Twenty-one (21) number 1 seeds lost in their conference tournament this postseason. This is the largest number of conference tournament upsets in at least ten years.

The North Carolina State Wolfpack (11-seed, 22-14) became the first double-digit seed (the ACC 10-seed) to win a conference tournament in more than a decade. NC State claimed their first Atlantic Coast Conference tourney title since 1987 when NCAA champion Jim Valvano was their head coach.

The Iowa State Cyclones’ (2-seed, 27-7) 28-point victory over the Houston Cougars (1-seed, 30-4) in the Big 12 conference championship final was the largest margin of victory over an Associated Press Number 1-ranked program in fifty-six seasons.  The last game to exceed this margin of victory was UCLA’s win (101-69) over Houston in the 1968 Final Four.

The East Region headed by Connecticut has 11 automatic qualifiers (teams that won their conference tournament), the West has 8 AQs, the Midwest: 7, and the South Region: 6.

The Big 12 and SEC led all conferences with eight teams earning tournament berths. The Big Ten and Mountain West tied for the second-most with six teams receiving bids.

If you are looking for information to talk you off prohibitive favorite Connecticut, consider this: no defending champion has made it past the Sweet Sixteen since Florida in 2007. In the past six tournaments, the defending champ was eliminated in the first or second round (1-seed Kansas in 2023, 1-seed Baylor in 2022, 4-seed Virginia in 2021, 6-seed Villanova in 2019, 2-seed North Carolina in 2018, and 1-seed Villanova in 2017).

A team seeded 4 or worse has made the Final Four in each of the last thirteen seasons. In last year’s turbulent tournament, 4-seed Connecticut was the best seed to make the Final Four.

The Duquesne University Dukes (11-seed, 23-11) out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania enter the tournament for the first time in 47 years. This is the longest absence of any team in the field.

The Nebraska Cornhuskers (8-seed, 23-10) have joined the tournament field for the first time since 2014 and eighth time overall. They are the only school from a power conference to have never won a tournament game.

Tournament Update Schedule

Today, Thursday, March 14, 2024 at 12:50 EDT, we released the first ‘over-the-air’ database update to Bracket Master.  Download this by going to the app’s Settings Page and clicking on the ‘Check Now for Update’ button.  This updates the projected tournament bracket and includes team statistics for games through Wednesday.  As of this morning the following automatic qualifiers are now in the big dance: Stetson, Montana State, Longwood, College of Charleston, Oakland Michigan, Drake, Wagner, Morehead State, Colgate, Samford, McNeese State, and South Dakota State, James Madison, and Saint Mary’s.

Bracket Master will get another data update after the tournament selection show on Sunday night, followed by a full app update on Monday morning.

The Monday update will include a new feature: the ability to tag your favorite teams and have them appear at the top of the Teams front page listing.  Monday will also include the final regular season statistics and assorted functionality improvements.

As the tournament progresses, we plan to put out data updates the morning after the completion of each round.

Enjoy the tournament, everyone!  It should be a wild one.

Leap Day Major Update

Bracket Master is being updated today with its first functionality additions of the year. This release has been in the works since November and primarily comprises ‘under-the-hood’ improvements, but there are several new features included.

The app now includes several new well-regarded team rating metrics. Also, our exclusive Scrutinous Score has been refined and given more visibility in the app. We believe the enhanced Scrutinous Score and Scrutinous Game Odds have significantly improved our (already very successful) tournament game picks and simulation.

A Compare Teams function has been added to the top-level menu. This allows you to view side-by-side statistics of any two teams from any season. This feature was previously available through the Picks Page to contrast teams in a scheduled matchup, but this new option gives much more flexibility.

A Settings page has been added to the top-level menu. This allows you to set a Dark Theme or Light Theme display. Additionally, the ability to update the app’s data is provided. Clicking on the ‘Check for Data Update’ button will query the internet for a data file refresh. This is a database file provided by Scrutinous, so an update won’t always be available, but this function should allow us to deliver more frequent data refreshes to you. When an update is available via your app store, you likely will not be able to update using this option.

All of the team and conference logos have been refreshed and hopefully improved.  Some of the images don’t look great while using Dark Mode, so we’ll try to revise them over time.

This Bracket Master version 1.4.1 update is essentially a full re-write of the app. The new code base should improve performance, polish the app’s appearance, better support the delivery of new features, and sustain the app over the long term. Stay tuned for more big enhancements coming this year.

If you encounter a bug, please describe it on our Report a Bug forum. We welcome suggestions for new functionality on our Request a Feature forum.