Each team's chance to reach every round of the NCAA tournament, and picks for a bracket pool.
How It Works
Every game is called by our college basketball prediction on a neutral floor. We play the whole bracket out 20,000 times (a Monte Carlo simulation) and count how often each team reaches each round.
Most points: the bracket with the most expected points under 10-20-40-80-160-320 scoring, worked out from those chances.
Bigger pools: finishing first among many entries takes picks the others don't have. We try the likeliest champions with different Final Fours and score each against simulated pools. Est. Picked is our guess at how other entries pick, from the seeds and our ratings, leaning to favorites. No real pick data is used.
Until Selection Sunday the field is Bracketology's projection, placed in regions by seed order (the S-curve).
Keep in Mind
The pick estimates are guesses: real pools lean on brand names we can't see. Injuries aren't counted, and the projected regions are ours, not the committee's.
When It Updates
Daily. From Selection Sunday it runs on the official bracket, and on the results as games finish.
For the Curious
Rehearsed on March 2026 with ratings frozen on Selection Sunday, the round chances beat seeds alone (log loss 0.18 to 0.20 for the men, 0.12 to 0.14 for the women), and the most-points bracket scored 1,020 of 1,920 points for the men, 1,200 for the women.