2025 Women’s NCAA Brackets Year in Review

The 2025 NCAA Tournament has concluded, and so has our first year offering NCAA Women’s Basketball Brackets.

Overall, it was a very good Year One performance, as our most common champion and finals recommendation (Connecticut over South Carolina) is what actually occurred.

2025 Women’s NCAA Tournament Recap

No. 2 Connecticut finished a dominant run by beating No. 1 South Carolina 82-59, after beating No. 1 UCLA in the Final Four, 85-51.
Connecticut also beat three different No. 1 seeds, as they faced USC in the Elite Eight.
No. 1 Texas was the other Final Four team, losing to South Carolina in the Final Four.
The Elite Eight featured three No. 2 seeds, a No. 3 seed (LSU), and the four top seeds.
No team seeded below the No. 5 seeds reached the Sweet 16 in 2025.
No. 10 South Dakota State and No. 10 Oregon were the only double-digit seeds to win in the first round and the only teams to win a game against a team that was seeded more than one seed line better than them for the entire tournament.

Reminder: If you used the NCAA Bracket Picks product this year, please complete our subscriber survey if one is available to you, so we can collect real-world data on how our brackets performed.

PoolGenius 2025 Bracket Performance Summary

Our pre-tournament data had No. 2 Connecticut and No. 1 South Carolina as the top two favorites. Both were also being picked less than our projected win odds, with Connecticut showing as the best value (likely because they were not ranked as a No. 1 seed by the Selection Committee and were also paired with USC and one of the most visible women’s players in 2025, JuJu Watkins).

Here’s how that dynamic generally impacted our optimized brackets in 2025:

Most of our Best Brackets had Connecticut as champion, and most of those had South Carolina as runner-up.
South Carolina was the only other champion pick for Best Brackets.
UCLA was the most common other champion pick in alternate brackets, while a small number of pools might have had No. 1 USC, No. 1 Texas, or No. 3 Notre Dame as champion.
Our ratings generally had the No. 5 seed line rated much higher than the No. 4 seed line, so even with home-court advantage in the second round for the No. 4 seeds, we had a fair number of picks on the No. 5 seeds.

Performance Update (with Survey Results)

This section was updated on Thursday, April 24, to reflect the results of the subscriber survey.

With several weeks of survey results now calculated, we now have our first set of results for the Women’s Basketball Bracket Picks. For those who participated in Year One, it was a highly profitable year overall, and our brackets produced results that will be tough to beat in future years.

Overall, subscribers won a prize in each individual pool 60% of the time, versus an expectation of 8.8% based on pool size and payout information. That 6.9x edge compared to expectation trails only the 2017 Men’s Tournament results for average edge, for those using our bracket products.

Just as this year, when most of our Best Brackets had Connecticut over South Carolina in the title game, the 2017 tournament also had the correct champion (North Carolina) and runner-up (Gonzaga) as the most common picks.

With our Best Brackets performing so well, those entering only one or two brackets saw the biggest edge (around 10x), while the edge decreased with more brackets entered. That will not always be the case in future years, as in some years the alternate brackets will see better success when the primary champion and runner-up picks fall short.

Subscribers saw really strong results across a number of pool sizes. The relatively strongest were:

31-50 entries: 14.9x edge
10000 or more entries: 14.6x edge
51-100 entries: 13.3x edge

Those numbers are approaching “difficult to reproduce” territory. For example, if a 50-entry pool had three payout spots (6%), a 14.9x edge would result in a nearly 90% rate of finishing in the money.

The bracket picks, understandably, were strongest in round-based scoring, both standard scoring and other round formats. Meanwhile, seed-based scoring was the one modest performer, with subscribers showing a 1.7x edge compared to the public in placing in the money in those formats.

What a Winning Bracket Looked Like in 2025

Winning bracket entries likely picked Connecticut over South Carolina for the title game and often had all four Final Four teams.
In one pool we examined, all of the top 10 finishers got the title game correct, all the Final Four teams correct, and averaged 7.0 teams correctly advancing to the Elite Eight.
With so few upsets, earlier swing outcomes in the No. 2 vs. No. 3 Sweet 16 matchups and the No. 4 vs. No. 5 second-round matchups likely differentiated entries on the leaderboard.

PoolGenius 2025 Bracket Performance Detail

Here is how our bracket picks compared to the public for the 2025 tournament in each round:

Bracket Type	Correct R1 Picks	Correct R2 Picks	Correct Sweet 16 Picks	Correct Elite 8 Picks	Correct Finalist Picks	Correct Champ Picks
PG Best Brackets For 1-2-4-8-16-32 Scoring	26.7	13.5	7.00	3.92	1.66	0.95
PG Best Brackets For All Scoring Rules	26.6	13.4	6.97	3.91	1.69	0.88
All PG Brackets For 1-2-4-8-16-32 Scoring	27.3	13.2	7.00	3.45	1.28	0.25
All PG Brackets	27.2	13.2	6.95	3.44	1.29	0.26
The General Public	26.5	11.9	5.67	2.35	0.91	0.21

The first-round performance among the “toss-up” games was merely okay. So, after the first round, our entries were roughly in line with the public average. However, from that point on, they dominated the public, which was far too willing to pick upsets in the brackets and did not think as highly of Connecticut when the tournament began.

Our Best Brackets, on average, got 13-14 teams to the Sweet 16, got 7 Elite Eight teams correct, and the majority had all of the Final Four and the correct title game picks.

Let’s take a look at what went right and wrong in 2025.

What Worked and Didn’t in Our 2025 Brackets

Generally, a successful bracket-picking strategy (especially for larger bracket pools) requires making some calculated bets against the public.

The logic determining which teams we “bet on” in our customized brackets for subscribers is driven in part by each team’s tournament rating, which often includes an adjustment we make to its full-season power rating based on factors like lineup changes and injuries.

For example, we had our biggest positive adjustments on the following teams seeded at No. 10 or better due to things like past injuries and form:

No. 2 Connecticut (won title)
No. 1 UCLA (reached Final Four, lost to Connecticut)
No. 5 Kansas State (reached Sweet 16, winning at No. 4 Kentucky)
No. 8 Richmond (won first-round matchup)

As a quick reminder, we provided subscribers with all our adjusted tournament predictive ratings in our NCAA Bracket Picks product, with summary notes if we made an adjustment.

Here are some common themes that likely impacted 2025 results for the majority of our subscribers.

1) Connecticut Was Really Good

Connecticut got a No. 2 seed because they lost some key early games and play in a Big East Conference that provides fewer “top quad” opportunities than teams in the ACC, Big Ten, or SEC.

But those early results came when they were not at full strength. By tournament time, their top three, Paige Bueckers, Sarah Strong, and Azzi Fudd, were as good as any team in the tournament.

Correctly having Connecticut rated highly while benefiting from them being less popular than our estimated title odds resulted in taking a firm stand on Connecticut to win. That stand ended up paying off.

2) South Carolina Was the Best Option on the Right Side of Bracket

South Carolina was also highly rated. They were a little more popular, but still a good value to win the title.

Their region was projected as a relatively easier one, and even though they did not play well for long stretches in the tournament, they made a run all the way to the title game.

3) Notre Dame Lost to TCU

Our most significant negative result was No. 3 Notre Dame losing to No. 2 TCU.

To make it even tougher, we had one of our biggest negative adjustments on Notre Dame entering the tournament, based on their late-season form and early wins against injury-depleted teams. Despite that downgrade, Notre Dame was still rated higher than TCU and was the less popular pick in the matchup.

It was also the most wide-open region, so some larger pools had deeper runs to the Final Four with Notre Dame.

Missing the points on Notre Dame was the only consistent loss in the final three rounds for most brackets, and it may have been the difference in some relative positioning.

4) The No. 5 vs. No. 4 Calls Were Mixed

We nearly universally picked No. 5 Kansas State over No. 4 Kentucky and No. 5 Alabama over No. 4 Maryland. Both games went to overtime, the Alabama-Maryland one after a big second-half comeback. Our position split on those games.

The other two matchups were split across our bracket sets—some had No. 5 Mississippi over No. 4 Baylor, others had No. 5 Tennessee over No. 4 Ohio State, and a few included both outcomes.

Both No. 5 seeds won, so individual brackets may have seen differing results from the No. 4/5 games.

In a year when the top seeds won and there were no real notable upsets, these games become more important in deciding the order of the standings at the top.

Wrapping It Up

Playing in bracket contests can be risky, especially when one or two negative results can spell doom for your bracket. Our position on Connecticut was a strong one, and it worked out. As a result, we expect very good results for our subscriber base overall in Year 1. However, there will be other years where some of those key picks do not win.

Over the long term, picks that strike the best balance of risk and contrarian value based on your pool’s characteristics will generate the best returns. But even then, there are typically some very close calls to make for key picks like your NCAA champion, Final Four teams, or even some key early-round picks. The results of those close calls can spell the difference between winning and losing.

This year, our Best Brackets nailed the correct champion, which meant many alternate brackets—with South Carolina or UCLA as champions—didn’t perform as well. That’s by design. The alternates are intended to complement the Best Bracket, and in future years, they may outperform when the top pick falls short.

It was a good learning experience in Year 1 with our NCAA Women’s Basketball Brackets, and we hope that it will grow from here, now that we’ve had a year to demonstrate the advantage you can gain with an objective, value-based approach.

Have a great summer, and we hope to see you back for March Madness 2026!