The future 2024 NCAA Tournament field looks...fine?

A topsy-turvy year at the top belies the fact that this looks less chaotic than 2023, though still pretty chaotic

When I was younger, the big and fun thing to do was to drive to Toys ‘R’ Us to knock off a couple of items from a birthday or Christmas wishlist. This could be a variety of things, but once I got the PlayStation 2 at age 8 (the biggest moment in my life prior to meeting my wife 12 years later), it was all video games from there for about seven years. One of the first I remember is what I’m sure is the off-brand version of a better game: NCAA Final Four 2002.

I had the March Madness series when I was younger and toyed with the 2K series for a bit, but for years, until the disc finally wore out, this was my college basketball game of choice. First, it was great for short attention spans, because you could sim through more or less every game with ease. Second, recruiting was honestly very easy; you just reloaded the game over and over until a good-enough recruit popped up.

Third was the most important piece: the bracketology. Back in those days, RPI was the king metric, but your team’s RPI wouldn’t show until February 1 of a given year. Of course, your season didn’t begin until the week of Thanksgiving, so that would be like mid-January now, but it’s stuck with me forever. For the most part, I never look at bracketology stuff or field comparisons until the calendar flips to February.

In that spirit, it’s time to bring back something we did last year. How does the 2023-24 projected field (well, the top 50 teams) compare to those of previous years? Last year, it helped us realize well ahead of time that we were in for an all-time insane NCAA Tournament.

With all of this in mind, I wanted to run back the same study for 2023-24, based on the February 1 date of the last 27 seasons. The results are in, and…well, we’re in for what looks like a pretty standard NCAA Tournament. Seriously!

BEHIND THE WALL ($): Hope you liked 2007, 2011, and 2012