In my opinion, the middle of March is the absolute best time of the year. Over the past two weeks we have witnessed the exciting conclusion of several regular season conference races, followed by 31 conference tournaments. This past weekend, the full 68-team NCAA Tournament bracket was released. Sports fanatics are on the brink of Madness.

Who will play the role of Cinderella in the story of the 2026 tournament? Will any survive to reach the second weekend? Which four teams will advance to Indianapolis and the Final Four on that first weekend in April? Which lucky team will end up cutting down the nets? 

Over the years I have developed a set of analytics and computational tools to gain a better understanding of the mathematical underpinning of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. My methodology has a solid track record of correctly identifying upsets and sometimes doing more than that. In 2023, I used data to correctly predict that No. 4 seed UConn would win the National Title.

There is no foolproof way to dominate your office pool. My method reveals that the dice are loaded (and by how much) but it is still often a roll of the dice. That said, my method does provide some helpful hints as to the more likely March Madness scenarios. While we wait for the Madness to begin on Thursday at noon, "Dr. Green and White" is here to help you fill out your 2026 bracket. 

Before we did into the current bracket in detail, let's start with an overview of my methods and general trends to expect this year.

Methodology Overview

The foundation of my methodology is an observation that I made several years ago that boils down to this:

When it comes to NCAA Tournament upsets, the behavior is exactly the same as in regular season games. The odds are largely predictable based on Vegas points spreads and by tools that can predict point spreads, such as Kenpom efficiency margin data.

All of my analysis of college basketball odds is based on this same premise. Kenpom efficiency data can be used to assign probabilities to any arbitrary basketball match-up. Knowing this, the full season and any tournament can be mathematically modeled and its odds can be calculated.

My favorite plot to highlight this fact is shown below.

Figure 1: Correlation between NCAA Tournament upsets and the odds predicted using Kenpom efficiency data.

This figure compares the winning percentage for the higher seeds in the NCAA Tournament to the odds expected based on the average point spread of games with that seed combination. The figure shows that data for all seed combinations that have occurred at least 40 times.

Figure 1 tells us why No. 16 seeds have won two times over the past 40 tournaments (1.2% of the time). It is because on average No. 16 seeds are 22.5-point underdogs and 22.5-point underdogs win straight up 1.4% of the time whether the game in played in March or in November.

There are a few notable deviations from this correlation. For example, No. 10 seeds have surprisingly good luck against No. 2 seeds and No. 9 and No. 5 seeds do not upset No. 1 seeds in the second round or in the Sweet 16 as often as expected. As Figure 1 shows, the overall correlation is very strong.

The Vegas points spreads and the point differentials predicted by Kenpom efficiency margins also correlate very strongly. Figure 2 below shows how strong this correlation is for the first-round games in the 2026 NCAA Tournament.

Figure 2: Correlation between the Vegas lines and the point differentials predicted using Kenpom efficiency margins for the 2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.

Figure 2 gives us confidence that Kenpom efficiencies can be used to model the results of the NCAA Tournament.

2026 Bracket Overview

Sometimes we can get a sense of how "mad" the NCAA Tournament will be based on the results of the conference tournaments. Of the 31 total conference tournaments, 14 were won by the No. 1 seed (45%), 10 were won by the No. 2 or No. 3 seed (32%), and only seven were won by a No. 4 seed or lower. 

This distribution is more varied than the result of the 2025 conference tournaments, where the top seeds dominated. This abundance of chalk in 2024 translated into the most upset-free NCAA Tournament in the 46 years since seeding was introduced. Does this suggest that there will be a bit more chaos once the Big Dance gets underway?

I attempted to explore this question by simulating the results of the 2026 tournament 5,000 times and counting the number of upsets that occurred in each round. I then compared these values to the simulation and actual result from last year's tournaments as well to the results of the past 23 actual tournaments. The results are shown below in Figure 3.