2025 men's Division II Tournament odds

AKA: an experiment to Build Your Own Ratings

No fancy stuff here. I had six free hours today and managed to spend all of it reverse-engineering my own model based on each team’s Net Rating per 100 possessions, building out a basic strength of schedule measurement, and turning that into one schedule-adjusted ‘true’ rating for each team. AKA: KenPom, but for D2. You are…welcome?

Anyway, here’s the odds.

D2’s modus operandi is a hair different than D1 or D3, in that when they get to the Elite Eight, the remaining eight teams are reseeded 1-8 to give the best remaining team the easiest possible matchup and vice versa. So: these odds are probably not fully accurate. With six hours, though, it was worth a try, and compared to Massey’s model I’m pretty happy with the results. I guess mine are too low on Alabama Huntsville, maybe? But I think they got a raw draw anyway.

Your top three favorites - the Auburn, Duke, and Houston of D2 - are Nova Southeastern, Washburn, and Daemen. There’s a 75% chance your national champion is one of those three times, and in two out of every five simulations, it’s Nova Southeastern. But this can go haywire pretty quickly, as evidenced by this quick one I ran over at Massey:

An Elite Eight with teams like Biola (3.9% odds to get there) or Southern New Hampshire (1%) would be wild indeed. Yet every year, there’s always someone surprising who pops up out of nowhere to put together a run the program can live off of for a decade if not more. I’m looking forward to whoever pulls it off this year.

If you get the chance, pop on a D2 game or two over the next two weeks before the Elite Eight. It’s really, really fun basketball…especially if your title game is Nova Southeastern and Washburn, which is my dream.