Overview
What Is Bracket Studio?
Bracket Studio is a free tool for building an NCAA tournament bracket the way the Division I Men's Basketball Committee actually does it: by team resume, not by gut feel. It pulls live data from Warren Nolan — NET rankings, quad records, and the rest of the Nitty Gritty report — into a single screen, so every metric the committee weighs is visible while you're placing teams.
The field holds 76 teams across 16 seed lines. Seeds 1–9 are fixed at 4 teams each (all byes). Seeds 10–16 can hold more, since that's where Opening Round play-in games happen — the weakest at-large bids tend to land on lines 11–12, and the weakest automatic qualifiers on lines 15–16.
Workflow
How to Build a Bracket
1
Start from Auto-Seed or a blank board
Auto-Seed fills every line by current NET ranking as a starting point — useful for getting the bulk of the field roughly right before you make judgment calls. It's a full-board overwrite, so use it before you've made manual placements, not after.
2
Place teams by drag-and-drop or keyboard
Drag a team from the pool onto a seed line, or use keyboard placement if you prefer not to touch the mouse. Sort and filter the pool by any metric — NET, conference, quad record — to work through the field the way you'd naturally reason about it.
3
Compare teams head to head
Add up to 8 teams to the Compare pane to weigh their resumes side by side when a placement decision is close — useful for the bubble, where small resume differences decide seed lines.
4
Track the bubble
Teams just outside the field are sorted into First Four Out, Next Four Out, and Also Considered — a bubble ranking, not a round name — so you can see who's closest to the cut line as you finalize the field.
5
Save, undo, and share
Bracket Studio saves automatically to your browser — up to 5 named slots, so you can keep multiple bracket versions side by side. Undo goes back up to 20 steps (Ctrl/Cmd+Z). When you're ready, share a read-only link to your bracket with anyone, no account required on their end.
Reference
Key Concepts
NET Ranking
The NCAA's primary sorting tool for tournament selection and seeding, pulled live from Warren Nolan and refreshed nightly.
Quad Records
Win-loss record broken into four tiers (Quad 1–4) by opponent strength and game location — the committee's main lens for judging a team's best and worst results.
Bubble Tiers
First Four Out, Next Four Out, and Also Considered rank the teams just short of the field, closest to farthest from making it.
Auto-Seed
Fills every seed line by current NET ranking. Destructive — it overwrites the whole board, so it's meant as a starting point, not a touch-up tool.
Saved Slots
Up to 5 named bracket versions stored in your browser, so you can compare different theories of the field without losing earlier work.
Tips
Things Worth Knowing
↺
Undo (Ctrl/Cmd+Z) goes back up to 20 steps, so it's safe to experiment with placements before committing to them.
🔗
Sharing compresses your seed lines and bubble zones into a URL — anyone with the link can view your bracket without signing in.
📊
Once Selection Sunday happens, take your saved bracket to the
Bracket Performance Calculator to score it against the real seed lines using the Paymon Scoring System.
💾
Your bracket lives in your browser by default. Sign in to sync it across devices and unlock up to 5 saved slots instead of 1.
🌐
Bracket Studio and the Bracket Performance Calculator share a theme. Switching dark/light mode in either app applies to both.
