How to Use Bracket Studio · The Round Robin

Bracket Studio puts team sheets beside your seed list. During NET season it uses Warren Nolan's résumé data. Before that, the men's field uses dated KenPom imports, then current-season BPI when available. The women's field retains the previous season's NET until new ratings arrive. The data strip identifies the source and season.

The first time you open it, a short setup covers the data and saving, and sets your defaults: men's or women's, Classic or Ring board, how new brackets start, the ranking used for sorting and Auto-Seed, and the theme. Replay it any time from Help or Settings.

The field holds 76 teams across 16 seed lines. Seeds 1–9 are fixed at 4 teams each, all with byes. Seeds 10–16 can hold more, since that is where the 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.

How to Build a Bracket

Start from Auto-Seed or a blank board

Auto-Seed fills the field using your selected ranking and an automatic qualifier from each conference. It replaces the whole board, including any placements you have made.

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, including NET, conference and quad record, to work through the field the way you would naturally reason about it.

Compare teams head to head

Add teams to the Compare pane (2 at a time, or up to 8 with a free account) to weigh their résumés side by side when a placement is close. This is where the bubble gets decided, since small résumé differences move seed lines.

Track the bubble

Teams just outside the field are sorted into First Four Out, Next Four Out and Also Considered, so you can see who sits closest to the cut line as you finalize the field. These are bubble rankings and have nothing to do with tournament rounds.

Save, undo, and share

Bracket Studio saves automatically to your browser: one bracket per sport, or up to 20 per sport with a free account. History keeps a snapshot for each day you edit, so you can go back or copy one as a new bracket. 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.

Key Concepts

NET Ranking. The NCAA's primary sorting tool for tournament selection and seeding, pulled from Warren Nolan and refreshed nightly once it's published in early December. Until then the Studio ranks by ESPN's BPI.

Quad Records. Win-loss record broken into four tiers (Quad 1–4) by opponent strength and game location. This is 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 the official rank (NET, or BPI before NET) or the ranking you chose in Settings, one automatic bid per conference first. It overwrites the whole board, so treat it as a starting point rather than a touch-up tool; Undo takes it back.

Brackets and History. One bracket per sport stored in your browser, or up to 20 per sport with a free account. Each stays pinned to its season's teams. History keeps a snapshot for each day you edit and one before Auto-Seed or a reset; open one to go back to it or copy it as a new bracket. In Results, Mark caught up bookmarks what you've seen, so new finals count from there.

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 keep up to 20 brackets per sport instead of 1.

Bracket Studio and the Bracket Performance Calculator share a theme. Switching dark/light mode in either app applies to both.

Start with Bracket Studio, read How Bracket Studio's Scoring Works for how a finished bracket gets graded, or check the glossary for any term above.