Three weeks out from Selection Sunday, the song remains the same
A man, a plan, a tournament, Phoenix
Hi! This is the start of FREE WEEK at the website. We’re doing it early because on March 1 (Friday), I’m unveiling a new pricing structure for March Madness and the NCAA Tournament. There’s a chance that this newsletter will house 30+ posts in the month of March, including some guest posts if we’re lucky. Sign up now if you find this interesting. Love you. Sorry, that last bit was an accident.
Onward we go to the normal bits.
Hey, some cool news: three Sundays from now, we’ll have a real bracket. You will not have to hear the phrases “bracketology”, “bubble”, “snub”, “bid-stealer”, or the like again for many months. You will have actual, real games to discuss. You will have actual, real picks to make, things to talk about, and annoyances you and your friends can joke about together.
That is three Sundays from now. Until then, it is all hypotheticals. We know a few things:
Three of the four 1 seeds are locked up: Purdue, Houston, UConn. What order they’re in is uncertain but they’ll all be 1 seeds.
The final 1 seed will be one of Arizona, Tennessee, and North Carolina, likely in that order. There are tangential cases for any and all of Marquette, Alabama, Iowa State, or Kansas to get there, but pretty much all of those hypotheticals require a mega-hot streak and for all of those main three to fade a bit.
About 30 teams, including nine auto-bids, are pretty much fully in the field. That leaves around 15 at-large spots still with at least some amount of uncertainty.
But more importantly, it’s time to observe the strength of the field. We did this about three weeks back at the turn of the month, and three weeks out from Selection Sunday seems like a good time to provide an update of how the field’s shaping up. Some spoilers: there’s basically been no real changes. Like, an uncommonly low amount of changes. The change in the top 5’s average AdjEM, per KenPom, is the second-lowest in the last 27 years. The change in the top 25 is the fifth-lowest ever.
For once, we actually know pretty much everything we need to know. There hasn’t been much in the way of sudden rises or falls. For the most part, everything is as it was three weeks ago. There’s a chance of serious changes, as there always is, but compared to last year it’s a sea of relative calm.
So, instead of covering what’s different between now and February 1, I thought our headlines this time around would be better focused on how the field is shaping up as a whole. Consider this your recap of where things stand after 3.5 months of hoops.
This top 5 is not as weak as 2023’s. In fact, it’s remarkably average
Above is a large graph, but what I felt was the big story of last year was that there were truly no elite-level teams. By the time Selection Sunday arrived, only 2003 and 2006 gave less-powerful 1 seeds in Tournament history. Unsurprisingly, just like those two years, a non-1 seed won it all.
This year is different. All of the top three teams this time out are at a +30 AdjEM or better, with fellow top 5 teams Arizona and Auburn holding pretty strong. Regardless of who ends up the final 1 seed, this is very unlikely to be as weak a group as 2023. Of the four years immediately surrounding 2024, they averaged about two 1 seeds in the Final Four.
The top 25 gets stronger the deeper it goes
The back end of the top 50 is one of the strongest we’ve ever seen
I’m taking these two together, because I feel like they tell very similar stories with a minor twist. The story is just like it was in 2023: the deeper you go, the more relatively strong and intense the future field becomes. By the time you get to the back half of the top 50, you’re staring down one of the strongest groups in tournament history.
What this means is still TBD, but for similarity’s sake, you can look at 2010 as a possible comparison. That year had good-but-not-elite 1 seeds and a shockingly strong top 50 to go with it. A 1 seed won the title (Duke), but two 5 seeds made the Final Four and 9, 10, 11, and 12 seeds all made the Sweet Sixteen. Amazingly, that tracks as a pretty normal Tournament, given what we’ve come to expect.
Parity is real, though likely not as pronounced as 2023
Shoutout to Friend of the Substack Brendan Marks of The Athletic, who loves this stat. Last year, we had a Bernie Tournament: the gap between the top and the bottom was shorter than at nearly any other point in basketball history. On February 25, 2023, the top 10 teams and the bottom 10 teams of the top 50 (aka, 41-50) were separated by an average of just 10.28 points per 100 possessions, the smallest observed in 26 years in the KenPom database.
Today, that gap sits at 12.14 points per 100. This is still shorter than the historical average of 12.91, but it’s not as small a gap as it was last season. Chaos is real and still exists, but the narrative of AP Top 10 road teams struggling at unranked competition is doing a lot of heavy lifting to make this appear as wild as 2023. It isn’t, but it’s still pretty frisky.
We’re trending towards another rowdy tournament, but more like 2010 or 2013
This last one is more opinion than anything above. If we have a Tournament like 2023, it would be a genuine surprise. Everything we had data-wise last year pointed towards an all-time crazy one, and it certainly delivered.
This 2024 Tournament will probably have a lot of quirks of its own accord, but expecting a 5 vs. 9 for the right to play on Monday night probably won’t happen. I’d guess we have a 1 seed on one side and a 4 or something on the other, which is still strange but not quite UConn vs. San Diego State.
Then again, maybe we’ll tune in in April and the title game will be Arizona/Wake Forest. Anything is possible; such is the fun of March.