2025 Bracket Picks Writeup

To our returning subscribers, it’s great to have you back with us again in 2025, and we appreciate your loyalty.

This site would not exist without the ongoing (and growing!) support of a subscriber base that trusts data-driven analysis, understands the boom-or-bust nature of playing in bracket pools, and takes a longer-term view. Thanks to all of you for your continued support.

If you’re new this year, we’re happy you’re joining us, and we appreciate that you spent some of your hard-earned cash geeking out with us on 2025 NCAA brackets.

(Especially if you’re new, check out the expectations section at the bottom of this article when you have a minute. It gives a big-picture view of the inherent risks of bracket pools as well as our long-term performance.)

This is our official Bracket Writeup for 2025. We will add content throughout the week, from bracket strategy analysis to explanations of recommended picks to other important updates.

Here’s what you can expect and what has already been published. (After we publish a new section, we will activate the link in the table of contents below.)

2025 Bracket Writeup Table of Contents

1. About This Writeup

2. What’s New In 2025

3. Initial Reactions to the 2025 Bracket

4. Early Predictions & Value Analysis

5. Initial Brackets Explanations

6. Comparing Tournament Projections

7. Final Predictions & Value Analysis

8. Changes In Wednesday Brackets

9. 2025 NCAA Rooting Guide (Favor vs. Fade)

10. Brackets With Non-Traditional Scoring

11. Expectations For Using This Product

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1. About This Writeup

The purpose of this writeup is two-fold:

1) Share data-driven insights on the 2025 NCAA tournament

By Monday morning, we will have spent over 100 hours researching teams, evaluating the 2025 seeding decisions, analyzing paths to the championship in each tournament region, and examining public-picking trends data.

In this writeup, we’ll share all the key highlights related to bracket picking.

(To see the results of all our team research, don’t miss our Teams page, which will be live Sunday night.)

2) Explain the reasoning behind key picks you may see in customized brackets for your pool(s)

After our initial release of customized brackets on the evening of Monday, March 17, you will be able to generate customized bracket picks for pools you set up on the My Brackets page.

This writeup should address some of your questions about why we’re recommending certain picks this year. Although this product optimizes brackets for many different scoring systems, we will focus most of this writeup on the most popular 1-2-4-8-16-32 scoring system.

We also use this writeup to explain why we make certain decisions or calls. We do over 100 hours of research on the NCAA tournament teams, and while we are far from perfect, we believe (and have historical evidence) that our research process can uncover edges that other predictive approaches miss—whether they be different power ratings systems or even, sometimes, the betting markets.

For example, last year, we took an above-market stand on Connecticut being the best team entering the NCAA Tournament. Compared to other prognosticators, that was relatively bold. As you may recall, many predictive systems, like Ken Pomeroy’s ratings or ESPN’s BPI, had Houston rated highest entering the NCAA tournament. We outlined our rationale in last year’s Bracket Writeup segment, excerpted below.

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Here’s the biggest reason we adjusted Connecticut up, and you can decide if you agree with our logic. Regular season games missed by at least one starter:

• Houston: 1
• Purdue: 0
• Arizona: 0
• Connecticut: 11

And these weren’t just any absences. Most either involved Stephon Castle or Donovan Clingan, two of Connecticut’s three highest usage players on offense (along with Tristen Newton), and their dominant defensive presence on the interior in Clingan.

Before we get into more numbers, just knowing that Connecticut is rated similarly to these three other teams (who collectively had only one game missed by a starter) in our unadjusted power ratings. At the same time, they played without their top lineup for over one-third of their games this season, which should illustrate why the market (and we) have Connecticut as the tournament favorite, not Houston.

Here are the splits for Connecticut with and without all five starters:

• With all five starters: 22 games, +26.2 power rating
• Without a starter: 12 games, +17.7 power rating

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We intend to share those kinds of data-driven insights throughout this Bracket Picks Writeup in 2025 as we continue to research teams and the bracket.

2. What’s New in 2025

We are excited to share some updates for this year.

Team Growth & New Social Accounts

We’ve expanded our team and capacity to produce more written and social content, so be sure to follow our social accounts on X (TeamRankings, BetIQ, PoolGenius) as well as Instagram and TikTok.

You can also peruse more of our bracket strategy articles.

New College Basketball Email Newsletter

In February, we launched a new, free college basketball email newsletter called By The Numbers. It’s a year-round effort for fans of college hoops analysis with a bent toward predictions, team analysis, betting, and pools. You can browse past issues here.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, we plan to share insights during the tournament and off-season, so take a second and sign up here.

New Product: Women’s Basketball Brackets

Our biggest news of the season! You can now get customized picks and data tools for women’s NCAA bracket contests with our new Women’s Basketball Brackets product.

It uses the same pick optimization technology and processes that we employ to generate edge on the men’s side, although with a somewhat simplified set of data tools (this year, at least) compared to our men’s product.

If your current subscription does not include access to Women’s Basketball Brackets and you’d like to add it, check your email for an upgrade offer.

If you have not received one, contact support@teamrankings.com, and we will send you an upgrade link.

Return to Table of Contents

3. Initial Reactions to the 2025 Bracket

This section will be what it says—initial reactions and thoughts in the hours after seeing the 2025 brackets. The following section will have more detailed data and tables to accompany the analysis.