Every year in the late January to February time frame, I offically transition from college football fanaticism to college basketball fanaticism, and I begin working on my annual Brad-ketology column. This year I am a little later than usual in publishing my initial NCAA tournament bracket projection, as a murder trial that I prosecuted in late January and early February kept me busy for a while at work, and since then, I have been fairly preoccupied with the Olympics. Now that those major events are over however, it is time for me to turn my full attention to the impending Madness in March.

For the 16th consecutive season, this column will become the staple of my blog from now until Selection Sunday, and it will be tracked, as usual, on the nationally-recognized bracket project website which seeds NCAA teams by taking an average of the most prominent bracket projections in the country.

The teams below are displayed below on an S-curve, so they are ranked from left to right within each seeding line.  The italicized teams are ones predicted to win their conference tourney and gain an automatic bid to the dance.  For the conferences who currently have NCAA tourney teams, it is assumed that one of those teams will win their conference tourney.  If not, then a stolen bid would result, and the number of at-large bids would drop. You may also notice that some teams are listed in both the NCAA tourney and also in my list of “First Teams Out” of the Dance. These are teams predicted to be automatic qualifiers to the NCAA tournament who also would be in contention for an NCAA tourney at-large bid (but are currently just outside of the cut line) if they were to falter in their respective confernece tourneys. I dispaly these particular teams like this becuase it shows how close each of those squad would be to getting a potential at-large bid into the NCAA tournament field.

Moreover, just to clarify, my bracket projection is intended to project the NCAA Tournament field if it was chosen today.  Unlike some bracketologists, I am not trying to predict how each team will finish the season and then seed the teams based on that.  There is one slight exception to this rule, however, and that is that I have always chosen to award the projected automatic bid for each conference to the best team in that conference, and not the team who is currently leading the conference standings (for example McNeese State is listed as the projected Soutland Conference champion instead of first place Stephen F. Austin).  Given how unbalanced conference schedules are, it just seems like common sense to project that the best team in a conference will win the league championship, not the squad currently in first place.

There is one slight change to my 2026 Brad-ketology that is worth noting. It is that I am no longer projecting and publishing NIT and College Basketball Crown fields as part of my Brad-ketology analysis. Given how many schools have elected to opt-out of those tournaments the past couple of seasons, it has become impossible for anyone to accurately predict what those fields will ultimately look like on Selection Sunday. As a result, I am just going to be ranking the 10-15 best teams outside of the NCAA tourney at-large field so you can see which squads still have a chance to earn a bid to the Big Dance if things break their way down the stretch of the season.

Also, because I have waited a while to publish these initial projections, I was able to use the resutls from the NCAA tournament selection committees’ early reveal from this past Saturday to form the basis of my 1-4 seed lines. This projection includes those exact rankings modified slightly to take into account the results from the games played this past Saturday and Sunday. It is also worth nothing that I did a preliminary ranking of the 1-4 seeds on Friday night, so that I could assess how my analysis of the top teams, at this point, compared to that of the committee. Ultimately, I was fairly accurate in my analysis, as I only mis-seeded three teams. I had Houston as a 1 (instead of a 2), Iowa State as a 2 (instead of a 1), and Alabama (instead of Virginia) as the last # 4 seed. The other 13 teams in the early reveal field were correctly seeded, and in fact, my # 3 line had the same four teams in the exact order as the committee (Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, and then Gonzaga).

This bracket projection has been updated through all games played on Sunday February 22nd. Brad-ketology columns will typically be published twice a week (typically on Mondays and Fridays) and likely more often than that when it gets closer to tourney time.  Please feel free to comment or debate.

NCAA Tourney Field:

1-seeds: Duke, Michigan, Arizona, UConn

2-seeds:  Iowa State, Houston, Purdue, Illinois

3-seeds: Florida, Nebraska, Gonzaga, Texas Tech

4-seeds: Michigan State, Virginia, Kansas, Tennessee

5-seeds: Vanderbilt, Alabama, Arkansas, St. John’s

6-seeds: BYU, Louisville, Saint Louis, North Carolina

7-seeds: Utah State, Wisconin, Kentucky, Villanova

8-seeds: NC State, Iowa, Clemson, UCF

9-seeds: Miami-FL, Saint Mary’s, SMU, Georgia

10-seeds: Texas A & M, Texas, Missouri, Auburn

11-seeds: UCLA, Santa Clara, Southern Cal, Miami-OH, Indiana, New Mexico

12-seeds: South Florida, Belmont, McNeese State, Yale

13-seeds: High Point, Liberty, Utah Valley, UNC-Wilmington

14-seeds: Hawaii, North Dakota State, Austin Peay, East Tennessee State

15-seeds: Navy, Merrimack, Portland State, Appalachian State

16-seeds: Wright State, Long Island, Howard, Tennessee State, UMBC, Bethune-Cookman

NIT/College Basketball Crown Teams (in order of proximity to NCAA tourney at-large field):

1	VCU (21-7)
2	TCU (17-10)
3	Ohio State (17-10)
4	Virginia Tech (18-10)
5	San Diego State (17-8)
6	California (18-8)
7	Seton Hall (19-9)
8	Cincinnati (15-12)
9	South Florida (18-8)
10	Belmont (24-4)
11	McNeese State (21-5)
12	Tulsa (20-6)
13	Yale (19-4)