March Madness is just around the corner! Set your calendars for March 16th, 2025; that’s the first day of the men’s college basketball postseason process: Selection Sunday.
Selection Sunday is the highly anticipated announcement of the 68 universities to make the March Madness tournament. Both men and women’s seeding is announced that day(3/16/2025) but this article will only discuss the men’s selection process.
Prior to this year’s Selection Sunday, the NCAA DI men’s basketball committee has a lot of work to do. They’re in charge of creating the March Madness bracket and over the years have broken it down to a science.
In the 2024-2025 NCAA DI Men’s Basketball Championship Principles & Procedures For Establishing The Bracket, the committee outlines their process into three steps…
Step One: Selecting The 37 Best At-Large Teams
Out of the 68 total teams that make March Madness, 31 are automatically admitted if they win their respective conferences. No matter the strength of the conference, the best champion from each one locks up a spot in postseason play.
That leaves 37 spots for the committee to fill with “at-large” teams, schools that didn’t win a conference championship but are still March Madness worthy. There is no limit for the amount of schools that can be selected from a single conference.
With a stacked Southeastern Conference this season, we will likely see over half of the SEC make the 2025 tournament(~10 teams). The current record for the most teams from one conference to make the March Madness tournament is the Big East with 11 teams in 2011. Will we watch that record break this year?
The nitty gritty of the March Madness selection process goes as follows:
Each committee member chooses 24 teams that they believe should make the tournament. They then select an unlimited amount of teams that should receive consideration. All votes for the 37 at-large teams will be by secret ballot.
Any teams that receives all but three or less votes in each committee member’s original 24 teams makes March Madness.
The committee then forms an under consideration board and selects the remaining at-large teams that either received at least four votes from the committee members pool or was in their conference’s championship game.
From that list, each committee member votes on what teams should join the at-large selection. The eight teams with the highest votes compromise the next at-large ballot and are ranked in order. That under consideration process is repeated until all 68 spots are filled.
Step Two: Seeding All 68 Teams
This step is a little less complicated. The seed list* goes from one to 68 and is used to balance competition over the four regions of the March Madness tournament(step three). To keep the competition as balanced as possible, certain principles might preclude a team from being their true seed.
March Madness Seeding Process:
Each committee member will submit a list of the best eight teams, in no order, from the list of 68. The eight schools with the highest votes compromise the first seed ballot and are then ranked using NCAA’s “scoring system.”
The four schools that receive the lowest amount of votes are moved to the four lowest seeds. Then the process repeats itself until all teams are seeded. For each ballot the committee members nominate less and less teams.
Keep in mind the seed list ranking is different then the seed of a team in the March Madness tournament.
Seeding votes are also done in secret.
Step Three: Building The Bracket
At the most basic level, March Madness is broken into four regions: East, South, Midwest and West. In each region there are 16 teams(ranked one to 16) who will battle between each other to reach the Final Four. In the first round of March Madness, each 16 seed plays the one seed from their conference, the 15 seed plays the two seed, the three seed versus the 14 seed and so on.
Regions are determined by the universities natural interest aka the milage from the school to venue. If a team has an undeniable home court advantage due to natural interest, they will be moved to the next closest region or change seed placement by one.
Placing Teams Into Brackets:
The top four teams from the seed list will be put in separate conferences and the number one seed has their choice of region plus site within the region for their first two games.
The next four teams become the No. 2 seeds and are placed into a region but their true seed list position might change. Conference matchups are heavily avoided in the first couple rounds of March Madness so the true seeding list might be compromised to avoid this.
The No. 3 and No. 4 seeds are then placed into regions by true seed list order.
The five through 16 seeds are then distributed, keeping in mind specific March Madness principles. Rematches from non-conference play in the regular season, rematches from the previous two March Madness tournaments and conference matchups are all avoided when choosing what team goes where for the five through 16 seeds. Because of this, the committee might deviate from the true seed list.
The Final Piece Of The March Madness Puzzle
But before we kick off the Round of 64, the committee must whittle down the seed list from 68 to 64 teams. This is done through The First Four Round, the first official round of the March Madness tournament.
In the week prior to the Round of 64, the bottom four teams from the seed list and the last four teams selected during the at-large pool will pair up against each other. The four winners from those games will then be placed into a region through the process outlined in step three.
In previous years the at-large winners are around the 10-12 seeds in the tournament itself and the bottom teams from the seed list are the 16 seeds.
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