Do you know where your 1 and 2 seeds are?
You should...at least since 2017, anyway
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Throw a dart around your timeline and you’ll find a bracketologist. Seriously! The field has exploded in the last few years, with a peak in 2022-23 of 229 people/groups that submitted a final bracket to the Bracket Matrix. In fact, there are so many varying opinions and brackets being submitted now that the best predictor is the Matrix itself, clearing the field by a couple miles as of recent.
I have to admit that I don’t find bracketology terribly useful until, like, February 1. And even then, there are reasons to doubt how useful it may or may not be. For instance, on February 1 last year, you would have had Tennessee as a 1 seed (eventually a 4) and Rutgers fully in the field of 68 as a 7 (went to NIT). Still, I think of it as a prompt more than a Bible: how many of these teams will still be in this exact spot a month from now?
The good news, friends, is that you don’t have to wait until February 1 to find that out. Well, at least for two seed lines.
With a 48-for-48 hit rate since 2017, you can narrow down the field to just 15 teams by January 23 every year to be 1 or 2 seeds. Those 15 teams, not coincidentally, happen to be inside the KenPom top 15.
For six NCAA Tournaments running (including 2020-21, where their ‘January 23’ was a couple weeks later), you can effectively know who’s going to be on the top two seed lines nearly two months ahead of time. Well, sort of; you can narrow down the field a good bit. You can also break this down a bit further:
The #1 team is a 100% lock to be a 1 seed. No shocker here, but considering the doubts Houston faces on a daily basis, just a reminder that it would be a tendency breaker for them to not end up on the 1 line.
#2 and #3 are also locks to end up on the top two lines. Both Purdue and Arizona, which shouldn’t shock anyone, will be 1 or 2 seeds. It’s more likely than not that both end up on the 1 line, but a 2 at worst is likely.
Being in the top five also gives you an 83% shot (25/30) at a top two seed. It’s more likely than not that both Tennessee and Auburn end up on those top two lines, though with a cautious note that this exercise does average about a one-per-year failure rate.
But what this really means is that as of today, January 23, you can mentally go ahead and start preparing for eight of these teams to be on the top two seed lines.
Now, normally, I would not find this newsworthy. Telling you that the top 15 teams in the sport’s leading advanced metric are going to fill in the 1 and 2 seed lines is pretty dumb stuff that a child could come up with. The problem, for you and for me, is that I made the mistake of looking at this week’s AP Poll, wherein I saw the following.
Scattered in amongst a normal-looking top 10 are Kentucky and Kansas, who sit 16th and 19th in KenPom this morning, respectively. Now, it would be a little wild for a media member to come out and say there’s a 0% chance that either Kentucky (a serious media fave at the moment) or Kansas (is Kansas) will end up a 1 or 2 seed. After all, there’s a reason I left the first five years of our graphic out.
Prior to the 2019 NCAA Tournament, the NCAA’s main metric of choice was the awful RPI. You could certainly blame some of the above results on that if you cared to. That being said, the NCAA themselves said leading into the 2016 NCAA Tournament the RPI was no longer a factor. That year simply had some dramatic late rises (Oregon and Xavier) and weird one-off circumstances like #1 Louisville being banned from the Tournament due to misgivings.
Blaming just the AP Poll would probably be bad, because if you head to the Bracket Matrix, you’ll see Kansas on the 2 line, just days after they were a consensus 1 seed prior to a loss to West Virginia.
It would be wrong of me to tell people to not rank Kansas this highly in a bracket exercise, of course. By Wins Above Bubble, the Jayhawks sit 7th and have some pretty tremendous wins on their side. Then again, if we were going by Wins Above Bubble, we would have Dayton - 6th in WAB, one fewer loss, and just six spots lower in KenPom - no lower than a high 3 seed, correct? Of course not. They’re barely on the 4 line at the moment.
The point of this is not to disparage voters, bracketologists, Kentucky, or Kansas. It’s simply to point out a pattern: with a very high hit rate, especially after advanced metrics like KenPom became a much bigger part of the selection process, you can narrow down your search for high seeds to a select few weeks ahead of the Big Dance. That list won’t include the current AP #6 or #7 teams, but it will include an unranked Alabama, #23 Iowa State, and #21 BYU. How’s that for satisfactory? I need a shower.