2025 Tournament Final

Congratulations to the University of Florida Gators for their third NCAA men’s basketball championship.  Florida defeated the University of Houston Cougars 65-63.  Florida trailed by as many as 12 points in the game.  They trailed by at least five points in four different games during this tournament.

This year’s Final Four consisted of all 1-seeds.  It was the first occurrence of this since 2008.  Two 1-seeds met in the championship final for the 11th time.  It was the second consecutive year that the Final consisted of two 1s.  This two-year span of 1-seeds previously happened in the 2007-2008 championships.

For the first time since 2012, no 5-seed or worse reached the Final Four.  No 4-seed or worse reached the Final Four for the first time since 2009.  Further emphasizing the ‘chalkiness’ of this tournament, no 13 through 16-seed won a Round of 64 game for the first time since 2017.  Nevertheless, two 12-seeds (Colorado State, McNeese State) advanced into the Round of 32 for the third year out of the last four.  It was the first tournament win for the McNeese State Cowboys after three previous visits.

The Gonzaga University Bulldogs had their streak of nine straight Sweet Sixteen appearances come to an end.  They were defeated by championship runner-up Houston 81-76 in the Round of 32.  Houston now holds the longest active streak of Sweet Sixteens with six consecutive seasons.

2025 Tournament Preview

The 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament lengthens its streak of fielding at least one team making their tournament debut. This is the 86th tournament and each one has featured a first-time team.  This year features four debut schools. They are the University of Nebraska at Omaha Mavericks representing the Summit League, the High Point University Panthers of High Point, North Carolina from the Big South Conference, the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Cougars from the Ohio Valley Conference, and the University of California at San Diego Tritons of the Big West Conference. The Tritons made the field in their first year of eligibility after four mandated transition seasons to Division I from Division II. UC San Diego enters the tournament with the nation’s longest win streak of 15 games.

The Southeastern Conference set a record for the most number of berths by a conference. The SEC received 14 invitations.  The previous high was the Big East Conference in 2011 when they received 11 berths. In that tournament, nine of eleven Big East teams lost in the first or second round, but member team Connecticut hoisted the championship banner.

The SEC has four teams as 1 or 2 seeds. This is just the second time a conference has earned that many top-two seeds. In 2021, the Big Ten also had four top-two seeds, but in that tournament only one of those four advanced to the Sweet Sixteen. That team, Michigan (1-seed), lost in the Elite Eight.

This year’s top seeds are the Auburn Tigers (their 2nd 1-seed), the Duke Blue Devils (their 15th 1-seed), the Houston Cougars (their 3rd), and the Florida Gators (their 3rd). Houston earned a 1-seed for the third-straight season.  The other teams that have been a 1 in three straight tournaments are: DePaul (1980-82), Virginia (1981-83), Kentucky (1995-97), Duke (2004-06), North Carolina (2007-09), Kansas (2016-18), and Gonzaga (2019-22).

A team seeded 4 or worse has made the Final Four in each of the last fourteen tournaments.  For 5 seeds or worse, the streak is eleven seasons. In last year’s tournament, 11-seed North Carolina State and 4-seed Alabama reached the Final Four, but neither reached the Final.

A team seeded 7 or worse has advanced to the Elite Eight in 12 of the past 13 tournaments. The 2019 tournament is the outlier within this stretch.

The Saint Francis University Red Flash from Loretto, Pennsylvania earned their first berth in 34 years. Their only other berth came in 1991. Saint Francis’ Northeast Conference has produced eight different league tournament champions in eight years. The Red Flash are one of only five teams (since 2002) to make the tournament with a KenPom ranking worse than 300.  Saint Francis is ranked 311 by KenPom, the third-worst position for a tournament team.  The worst ranking for a tournament qualifier is the 2018 North Carolina Central Eagles at 316.

2025 Tournament Bracket Live

Update: Version 1.5.2 is now available from all app stores as of 1:57 PM EDT Monday, March 17.  It includes a statistics update for the Sunday games and a small new feature – the yearly records on the Conference-Teams Page are now color-coded for deep tournament runs.

The official 2025 men’s college basketball championship bracket is now available in the Bracket Master app as of 8:40 PM EDT Sunday, March 16.  This is downloadable as an ‘over-the-air’ database update to Bracket Master.  Download the new bracket by going to the app’s Settings Page and clicking on the ‘Check Now for Update’ button.  A full app update wil be coming in the next couple days from your app store to include statistics from today’s (Sunday’s) games.

Save Bracket As Image

Our first new feature of 2025 allows you to save entire brackets to your device for usage outside of the Bracket Master app. Create the best-looking tournament brackets anywhere!

This functionality is provided from the Years tournament pages, the Picks page, and the Simulation page. Bracket images are saved as a standard ‘.png’ file and may be viewed using your pictures gallery, shared online, printed for examination in a larger format, or perhaps submitted to a bracket pool.

Tap on the Save Image ‘panorama image’ icon at the top right of the screen to
generate a picture of the entire bracket. When using this function from the Picks page, a bracket image will be generated showing your game selections with color-coding for correct and incorrect picks based on game results. The Years and Sim pages will show brackets displaying the score of official or simulated games, respectively.  Remember to Tap the Help ‘question mark’ icon for guidance on any of Bracket Masters pages.

 

 

 

Tap the Save ‘floppy disk’ icon to save the bracket image to your device. The save location will default to the general user location of your device, though you can select a specific location using the save dialog. The image will be assigned a generated file name, though this may be changed using the save dialog, or from the Image Settings page (by tapping the gear icon). Use your device’s Files app to access the image after saving it. Using an Apple device, the bracket image won’t be accessible by the picture Gallery app unless you actively Share it to the pictures folder or an album using the Files app Share functions. Also use the Share function to text message or email the image. With an Android device, the bracket image will typically be automatically accessible by other apps, but if it isn’t the process is similar to that of Apple devices — use an Android file management app to Share the image with other apps or move it to another folder.

Tap the Settings ‘gear’ icon to modify the configuration of the image generation. The Image Settings page allows you to modify the bracket title line, the file name, and the optional appearance of logos, seed numbers, and game locations. See the Image Settings help page for more detail on these options.

Print your bracket image using ‘Landscape’ orientation and the ‘Shrink to Fit’ or ‘Scale to Fit’ option in your printer settings. Note that setting the display option for seed numbers and team logos to ‘All Rounds’ will cause the generated bracket to grow in width, so for tournaments with more than 32 teams the image will need to be scaled down to properly fit on a 8.5 x 11 inch or A4 piece of paper.

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.

The Cinderella Score: PTP

Bracket Master’s latest new feature is the Performance Page.  This page allows you to examine the tournament performance of Teams and Conferences compared to expectations.  The exclusive PTP© score presented here evaluates tournament advancement relative to the designated seed number.  PTP© is an initialism of Performance to Par.

PTP defines a seed’s expected performance par by assuming that the higher seed should always win, i.e., game results are determined by ‘chalk’.  If one works through a bracket picking the higher seed in every game, the following results unfold:

  • 1 seeds are meant to reach the Final Four
  • 2 seeds are presumed to reach the Elite Eight
  • 3s & 4s should make the Sweet Sixteen
  • 4s through 8s should win one game into the Round of 32
  • 9s through 16 aren’t expected to win a game.

PTP assigns a score based on these expectations.  For each game a team advances past their seed number’s expected round the team earns one point; each round the team fall short they lose one point.  For example, in 2022 the championship Kansas team (#1 seed) earned two points for winning two games beyond reaching the Final Four.  Saint Peter’s (#15 seed) earned a +3 for winning three games; their first round opponent, Kentucky (#2 seed), gets a -3 for not making their forecasted Elite Eight.

Accumulating a large positive score is challenging for high-major teams that consistently receive top seed bids because of how hard it is to advance deep in the tournament.  To help account for this, we display the Average Seed of each team alongside their PTP.  A lower (better) Avg Seed means the team was anticipated to win multiple games.  A positive PTP score over time with a low Average Seed is particularly impressive.

The challenge for highly seeded teams is contrasted by mid-major Cinderellas such as the Loyola Ramblers.  Their 2018 run as an eleven seed banked themselves +4 PTP.

We feel that the PTP listing of Conferences is particularly useful.  It lessens the bias of small sample sizes to illuminate the leagues that produce title contenders and dark horses, and those that have perhaps become over-rated for a span.

The PTP score helps to remind of the biggest shocks in tournament history, such as DePaul’s collapses as a #1 seed from 1980 to 1984, and Butler’s run to the finals in 2010 and 2011.  The DePaul years are described in the following article: The Bonus: March 14, 1981: When the NCAA tournament became Madness – Sports Illustrated.  Butler is said to be the smallest university to play in the championship game since the 1985 64-team field.  Their 2010 tournament is detailed here: Butler’s incredible 2010 NCAA run, remembered by Coach K, Tom Izzo, Frank Martin and Jim Boeheim | NCAA.com

The Performance Page featuring the PTP score is part of the BracketMaster 1.3.6 release of February 27, 2023.

Introducing the BEST

Bracket Master’s first new feature of 2023 is the Trends Page.  This page allows you to examine the consolidated tournament achievements of Teams and Conferences over a user-specified period of time.  The exclusive BEST© score presented here intends to identify the top entities over an extended period of time by tallying tournament victories, weighted by their advancement in the championship.  BEST is an acronym for BracketMaster Elite Season Trend.  The calculation of BEST is based on the following terms:

BEST© Achievement Points

  • 16 => Won Championship
  • 12 => Lost in Finals
  • 9 => Lost in Final Four
  • 6 => Lost in Elite Eight
  • 4 => Lost in Sweet Sixteen
  • 2 => Lost in Round of 32
  • 1 => Lost in Round of 64/First Four

This scoring system seeks to reward repeated deep runs without overemphasizing championship victories.  Tournaments in years prior to the 64-plus-team field (introduced in 1985) award the same number of points for championships, final fours, etc; those years just  don’t provide points for early, partial rounds.  For example, 1984 champ Georgetown earned 16 points, and first full-round (Round of 32) loser UTEP earned 2 points for making the tournament, but not winning any games.  Similarly, the 1939 tournament with just an eight team field awards 16 points for a championship and 6 points for a first game loss.

BEST also provides an optional weighting factor in order to emphasize more recent performance over that of the distant past.  Seasons of increasing time into the past have their achievement points reduced by a shrinking percentage factor.  BEST uses a 3rd degree polynomial to calculate the weighting factor, with more recent seasons slowly reducing in percentage, seasons after 20 years more rapidly falling, and then leveling out after 50 years in the past.  In terms of specific points, the weighting equation provides a 94% multiplier at 10 years, sliding to 67% at 30 years, 50% at 50 years, and bottoms out at 35% at 80 years.  The most recent five tournaments are always weighted at 100%.  The ability to disable this factor eases comparisons between different spans of time.

BEST can be calculated for the entire history of the college basketball tournament, but it also allows one to examine interesting questions, such as: who was the top team of the 1980s, or: what has been the most successful conference of the 21st century.

Thanks go out to user “Brewer” for suggesting the framework of this rating.  You can suggest your own idea for a new feature on our forum: scrutinous.net/forums/forum/request-a-feature/.

The Trends Page featuring the BEST score is part of the BracketMaster App 1.3.3 release of January 17, 2023.

2022 Tournament Final

Congratulations to the University of Kansas Jayhawks for their fourth NCAA men’s basketball championship, earned in their 50th tournament appearance.  Kansas defeated the University of North Carolina Tarheels 72-69.  The Jayhawks required the biggest comeback in championship game history.  North Carolina led by 16 points with the score 38-22 shortly before halftime.  Loyola University of Chicago held the previous record, erasing a 15-point second-half deficit to the University of Cincinnati in the 1963 championship game to overcome the Bearcats 60-58 in overtime.

North Carolina lost in the championship game for the sixth time in their history.  Kansas, Duke, and Michigan have also lost six Finals, which is the highest total.

Kansas is 5-2 all-time in NCAA Tournament games against North Carolina.  They avenge their loss to UNC in the 1957 Final.

Kansas is 8-0 in tournament games against Atlantic Coast Conference opponents since 2008.  Kansas defeated three Big East teams (Creighton, Providence, Villanova) and two ACC teams (Miami, UNC) on the way to the title.

The Big 12 Conference has won two straight championships.  This is the first conference to repeat since the ACC in 2009-2010, when North Carolina and Duke raised consecutive trophies.

Number 1 seeds have won the last five tournaments.  A five-straight-year streak by 1 seeds also occurred from 1992 to 1996.

North Carolina’s loss as an 8 seed lowers the record of 8 seeds in the Final round to 1-4.  Only the 1985 Villanova squad has won the championship as a number eight.

Villanova lost to the eventual champion for the seventh time since 2005, which was the year of the first tournament berth for coach Jay Wright.  The full list of losses:

  • 2005: North Carolina in the Sweet Sixteen
  • 2006: Florida in the Elite Eight
  • 2008: Kansas in the Sweet Sixteen
  • 2009: North Carolina in the Final Four
  • 2014: Connecticut in the Round of 32
  • 2021: Baylor in the Sweet Sixteen
  • 2022: Kansas in the Final Four

Picking a bracket “by chalk” — selecting the better seed in every game — achieved the highest bracket score from among our basket of team rating methodologies.  It was the first time chalk has done this, in all the tournaments for which we have calculated the score (all since 1998).  The Bart Tovik T-Rank finished second and our Scrutinous Score tied with Jeff Sagarin for third.  Lots of early upsets resulted in the worst year of bracket picking by the major rating metrics since 2011.  You can find this data on Bracket Master’s Picks Page by tapping the (i) button next to the ‘Scoring System’ option selector.

In the Sweet Sixteen, only six teams scored 70 or more points.  On average, 66.6 points per game were scored in the Sweet Sixteen, the lowest scoring output since 2015.