A Better Bracket, 2025

The SEC's worst nightmare...

This piece was written by Eli Powell except where noted otherwise.

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In 2022,

David Peterson

and

Ret!

were fed up with high majors. They were done with power conference failsons quality-lossing their way into at-large NCAA Tournament bids over teams who actually won their games.

And so, using two simple rules, they created A Better Bracket. Those rules were:

1. At-large selections must have a record greater than .500 in conference play. Not .500 or greater—greater than .500. If you go 9-9 in the SEC, you’re out.

2. At-large selections must also finish in the top half of their conference standings, rounding down if there’s an odd number of teams in the league. For example, in the 11-team Big East, an at-large selection must have finished fifth or higher.

For the past three years, we’ve built a bracket that follows these two rules.

A Better Bracket

A Better Bracket, 2023

A Better Bracket, 2024

The time has come to build yet another. Let’s make A Better Bracket for 2025.

To begin, let’s look at the actual NCAA Tournament bracket and see who we’re losing.

Teams in red are eliminated from A Better Bracket.

Seven teams miss the cut, six of them from the SEC.

Packing Their Bags

[8] Mississippi State | 8-10 in SEC (tenth in 16-team league)

Mississippi State notched a handful of decent wins in the non-conference slate, and a few unquestionably good wins in SEC play, including a sweep of rival Ole Miss. They still finished two SEC wins shy of qualifying for this bracket because they rarely looked competitive against the top of the league. An overtime home loss to Texas was the nail in the coffin.

[9] Baylor | 10-10 in Big 12

Historically, the Big 12 has been the league with the most to worry about in this exercise—before last season, they had just ten teams and almost all of them were super strong. This year, you almost had to take some relatively bad losses to finish .500 or worse in the Big 12, and Baylor definitely did. A home loss to rival TCU was their worst offense, but road losses at Colorado and Cincinnati in the span of four days didn’t help either. They would have avoided this fate had they won just one of those.

[9] Georgia | 8-10 in SEC (11th in 16-team league)

At least Georgia beat one of the juggernauts at the top of the SEC. They completely blew a 23-point lead in the process, but they did come out with the home win over Florida. But Auburn beat them twice and Alabama, Tennessee, and Texas A&M all destroyed them (and so did Florida earlier in the season). Missouri and Ole Miss also both beat them by double digits. I have no issue removing Georgia from this bracket. Win your games.

[9] Oklahoma | 6-12 in SEC (14th in 16-team league)

Oklahoma went a perfect 13-0 in non-conference play, including a Battle 4 Atlantis sweep of Providence, Arizona, and Louisville, and further neutral-court victories over Oklahoma State and Michigan. Then conference play started and…woof. Not only did Oklahoma not beat any of the elite SEC teams, but they also lost at home to LSU, which was the worst loss you could possibly take in that league this year. Bye bye.

[10] Vanderbilt | 8-10 in SEC (12th in 16-team league)

Vanderbilt played a horrendous non-conference schedule and lost to the only at-large-quality team they played in it (Drake on a neutral court). They fared a little better in SEC play, notching home wins over Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ole Miss, and even an away win at Texas A&M. Then they ended their regular season with double-digit losses at home to Arkansas and away to Georgia, and that’s how they ended up here.

[10] Arkansas | 8-10 in SEC (ninth in 16-team league)

Arkansas played three quality teams on neutral courts in non-conference play and went 1-2 in those games, losing to Baylor and Illinois but beating Michigan. They started SEC play 0-5, including a loss at LSU, and were on the wrong side of the bubble for a couple weeks. As late as March 1, their at-large bona fides were called into question after they lost by 19 points at South Carolina. But, in the end, Arkansas earned an at-large bid the same way everyone else did: by going winless against their league’s four elite teams and also losing to each of its two worst teams.

[11] Texas | 6-12 in SEC (13th in 16-team league)

I do not hyperbolize or exaggerate when I say that Texas’ at-large bid is the angriest I’ve ever been at a Selection Committee decision. It’s complete nonsense and proof positive that the committee artificially boosted the SEC without taking into account what each of its teams actually accomplished.

Texas played what KenPom ranks as the 348th toughest non-conference schedule out of 364 Division I teams, including home games against each of the bottom three teams in KenPom’s rankings (Chicago State, Arkansas–Pine Bluff, and Mississippi Valley State). They played two teams of roughly at-large bubble quality—Ohio State and UConn—and lost to both of them. Their only even remotely noteworthy wins were on a neutral court against Saint Joseph’s and at NC State, and NC State ended up being so bad that they missed the ACC Tournament and fired their head coach less than a year after reaching the Final Four.

In SEC play, Texas got one shot at each of the league’s four elites—Auburn, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee, all in the top six on KenPom—and lost all four, two of them by 20+ points. They did beat the three SEC teams ranked in the teens on KenPom: Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Missouri. All of those games were at home and the A&M game required a last-second shot to complete an 18-point comeback, but they were all wins; I’ll give them that. The problem is that those wins were basically all they had. They routinely lost to the lower tier of the league. They got swept by Arkansas and dropped games to Georgia (by 16 at home), Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, and South Carolina (by 15 on the road).

So, to recap: Texas did nothing in non-conference play, lost twice as many SEC games as they won, didn’t beat any of the league’s elites at all or any of the league’s second tier away from home, and lost to every other league member on the bubble plus South Carolina by 15 points. And if Colorado State didn’t steal the Mountain West autobid, Texas would have earned a bye in the NCAA Tournament. Are we joking?

There’s evidence to suggest that the SEC is at least a little overrated. As all historically powerful leagues have, they earned their reputation by winning an unsustainably high ratio of a pretty small sample of games in November and December. They’re obviously very good, but they’re not that much better than the other power conferences. And even if you take the league’s non-conference performance completely at face value, Texas’ contributions to it were nonexistent, so their résumé was built by beating a couple of the teams who actually did something before Christmas. It’s just advanced transitive property: Kentucky and Texas A&M did the actual work of lifting the SEC above other high major leagues while Texas snoozed until New Year’s Day and then beat the two of them at home by a combined five points. I wouldn’t really have an issue with this if efficiency metrics saw Texas as strong enough to be an at-large on their own merit, but they pretty much all had them in the 40-45 range, right on the fringes of the bubble.

And it’s not like Texas dominated their peers in Quad 2 either. Say what you want about North Carolina and Xavier; at least they actually won the wide majority of their games against teams in their stratosphere. Texas finished with a losing record in Quad 1 and a losing record in Quad 2, and even if you add their two Quad 3 games to the mix, they still entered Selection Sunday with a 12-15 record above Quad 4. And that’s after accounting for a 2-1 showing at the SEC Tournament, which the Selection Committee has recently done their best to ignore (see 2022 Texas A&M). That’s horrendous!

I have never derived more pleasure from deleting a team from the bracket for this feature than I did from backspacing Texas. More than any other selection in recent memory, Texas’ bid sets an awful precedent for lazy and complacent power conference teams to refuse to play anyone but the dregs of D1 unless there’s a trophy on the line.

I’m tired of talking about them. Let’s talk about better teams instead.

Picking the Field

Now that we’ve eliminated almost half of the SEC (and also Baylor), we can replace them with teams who actually won basketball games.

As with last year, I’m going to invite teams even if they declined a postseason invite, because almost everyone declines their non-NCAAT postseason invites now. They have to if they want any shot at upgrading their team through the transfer portal.

I’ll also retain last year’s method for determining which teams to invite: starting with the official First Four Out released by the committee, then going down the list of NIT seeds and interspersing teams who declined their bids where I feel they make sense. If a team meets the qualification standards, I’ll add them to the field; if they don’t, I’ll skip them. I’ll keep going down the list until I get seven new at-large bids.

Without further ado:

1. West Virginia: Skip (10-10 in Big 12)

2. Indiana: Skip (10-10 in B1G)

3. Ohio State: Skip (9-11 in B1G; 10th in 18-team league)

4. Boise State: Add #1 (14-6 in MW; fifth in 11-team league)

5. Wake Forest: Add #2 (13-7 in ACC; fourth in 18-team league)

6. UC Irvine: Add #3 (17-3 in BW; second in 11-team league)

7. Dayton: Add #4 (12-6 in A-10; third in 15-team league)

8. San Francisco: Add #5 (13-5 in WCC; third in 11-team league)

9. SMU: Add #6 (13-7 in ACC; sixth in 18-team league)

10. George Mason: Add #7 (15-3 in A-10; second in 15-team league)

I put Wake Forest immediately after the First Four Out, which feels correct; they did earn a double-bye in the ACC Tournament, and even in a down year for the league, you can’t just sleepwalk to that.

I’m also pretty sure there’s no public overall seed list for the NIT, so I just went ahead and ordered the teams on the same seed lines however I wanted. All four NIT 1-seeds were selected to the Better Bracket, but only one of them could avoid the First Four, and I gave that honor to UC Irvine. Then, all four 2-seeds were eligible to fight for one last spot. Over North Texas, Santa Clara, and Stanford, I gave the nod to George Mason, who I thought clearly had the best résumé of the four. (Both versions of WAB agree.)

Let’s now view our brand new field of 68.

The Bracket

Teams in green are new to the bracket. Teams in light blue moved up a seed line. Teams in dark blue moved up two seed lines.

Last year, five out of the six teams I removed were power conference teams and four out of the six teams that replaced them were also power conference teams. This year, all seven teams I removed were from power conferences—six of them from the same league—and five out of the seven teams that replace them are mid-majors.

If you can look past the total dominance of the country’s top few conferences, you’ll find that mid-major basketball this year was still alive and well. A lot of really good mid-major teams were just a tiny bit outside the at-large conversation.

David: These are the stories we’re missing out on when we choose to allow schools in based purely on titanic name or conference affiliation. I’m a firm believer that teams should never be judged on their performance in the Tournament as it relates to whether they should have made it, but there’s an undeniable joy that comes from a minnow making a run.¹ It’s one of the few remaining tournaments where David genuinely gets to take on Goliath anymore, hard as they’re attempting to even make that.

Teams hailing from power conferences have so many advantages. More money, better facilities, greater name recognition. A bracket that is truly equitable levels the playing field by choosing to only reward teams that merit inclusion. After all, with great reward comes great responsibility. No team that wins a third of their conference games should sniff an at-large inclusion - not when it comes at the expense of fantastic squads having once-in-a-decade or once-in-a-lifetime runs.

Few people will likely remember a Texas season where they went 19-16 and lost two-thirds of their conference games, but I bet there won’t be a Drake fan that’s gonna forget this year’s adventure. That is why A Better Bracket matters.

Eli: And perhaps, in the near future, the true bracket will better resemble the Better one. Just yesterday, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported that mid-majors (and the Big East) will likely be able to outspend the SECs and B1Gs of the world on basketball because they don’ t have big-ticket football teams to manage. If that’s the case, a world where the A-10, WCC, and Big West can all receive multiple bids seems pretty realistic. Maybe that’s just copium.

For how much football-driven realignment has already warped the basketball universe, it’d be much harder to complain if it also resulted in more mid-majors going dancing…even just temporarily.

1. Editor’s note: There was a similar undeniable joy when Texas flopped out in the First Four. —Eli