The best Sunday on the sports calendar is upon us, but before this year’s field of 68 begins to be announced at 6 p.m. ET, let’s look at the three biggest questions heading into the 2025 bracket reveal.
1. Who will be the No. 1 overall seed?
College basketball hasn’t had a two-horse race at the top of the sport like this since. . .well, since last year with UConn and Purdue. But even with the Huskies and Boilermakers — who would ultimately square off in the 2024 national title game — there was no drama as far as which one was going to be the pre-tournament favorite according to the Selection Committee.
That’s not the situation this year with Duke and Auburn.
The cases for both of the sport’s top dogs are almost equally compelling.
On one hand, there’s Auburn, which has built perhaps the strongest resume since the NCAA launched the NET Rankings system. The Tigers have a whopping 17 Quadrant-I victories, easily the most of any team in the country, and the most of any team since the NCAA went to the quadrant system. They are a combined 11-0 in games outside of Quadrant-I, they played the toughest schedule in America according to every metric, and they locked up an outright championship in the toughest league in the sport before the final week of the regular season even started.
Auburn also, after Saturday’s loss to Tennessee in the SEC tournament semifinals, has lost three of its last four games. The Committee is no longer supposed to take recent play into heavier consideration than overall resume, but there’s certainly a chance that the Tigers playing the way they did down the stretch and Duke playing the way it did down the stretch could serve as sort of a de facto tiebreaker.
The case for the Blue Devils is pretty straightforward. The Blue Devils are the No. 1 team in the country in both major human polls, they are No. 1 in the NET, No. 1 on KenPom, No. 1 in the BPI, No. 1 on T-Rank, and No. 1 in virtually any other ranking system you can find. The freshly crowned ACC tournament champions have lost just one game since Nov. 26, oh and by the way, they beat Auburn head-to-head back on Dec. 4.
Neither head coach was above doing some politicking on Saturday.
For Jon Scheyer, that meant making sure that everyone in the world knew that star forward Cooper Flagg, who sat out the final two games of the ACC tournament after suffering an ankle injury in Thursday’s quarterfinal, would be good to go for the Big Dance.
Dan Gavitt just said on CBS that Duke/the ACC have communicated to the selection committee that Cooper Flagg will be available for the NCAA tournament.
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) March 15, 2025
For Bruce Pearl, the messaging was a bit more direct.
Bruce Pearl with a message to the committee in his opening statement:
“I believe this team, from start to finish, has done enough to be the No. 1 overall seed for the NCAA Tournament…losing to Tennessee — a team ranked 5th or 6th in the country — should not necessarily knock us…
— David Cobb (@DavidWCobb) March 15, 2025
A year ago, UConn became the first No. 1 overall seed in 11 years to win the national championship. Either Duke or Auburn will have a great chance at making it two in a row, but only one will get the opportunity.
2. Just how many teams does the SEC get into the field?
It’s been a foregone conclusion for weeks, maybe months, that this year’s SEC was going to set a new record for the most number of teams from a single conference in an NCAA tournament.
The current record is 11 from the Big East back in 2011. The question now isn’t if the SEC is going to break the record, it’s by how many teams.
It would seem as though 11 teams from the SEC — Auburn, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Missouri, Mississippi State, Georgia and Oklahoma — are all stone cold locks to be in the field of 68. Three other teams — Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Texas — are firmly on the bubble, with most bracketologists feeling like the Razorbacks and Commodores will be in the field, but being less certain about the Longhorns’ prospects.
The record is going to happen. It’s just a matter of whether the new mark is set at 12, 13 or 14. Regardless, it’s likely going to be a long time, if ever, before we see the record matched or surpassed.
3. How much will Sunday’s championship games matter?
The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee has been all over the place for the last decade when it comes to the matter of how much the games that are played on Sunday are taking into consideration for the final bracket.
One year, they’ll say that the bracket is basically set on Saturday night and a couple of contingency brackets are created in case a massive upset happens in one of the games on Sunday. In other years, they’ll dismiss the notion that the Sunday games are played too late in the process for them to adjust on the fly.
How will they handle this season? Who the hell knows?
Maybe Florida vs. Tennessee is a de facto battle for the fourth No. 1 seed. Maybe the winner of Maryland vs. Michigan will get a 4-seed and the loser will be resigned to the 5-line. Maybe the Committee has already decided that VCU is out if it doesn’t win its A-10 championship game against UAB.
We won’t know until we see the results and get a bracket hours later.
What we do know is that there is still at least one potential bid thief out there that the Committee must account for.
Memphis is in the field. There’s no question about it. UAB is not. The Tigers and Blazers will meet Sunday afternoon for the American Athletic tournament championship. If UAB prevails, it will absolutely knock out the team that is currently slated to be the last squad in the field of 68.
The drama will be fast and unrelenting all day on Sunday. And that’s before we get a bracket.
