How to Use Bracket Studio

Building a 76-team bracket off live NET data, comparing teams, tracking the bubble, and sharing what you built.

Bracket Studio is a free tool for building an NCAA tournament bracket the way the Division I Men's Basketball Committee does it, off team résumés. It pulls live Warren Nolan data into one screen, including NET rankings, quad records and the rest of the Nitty Gritty report, so every metric the committee weighs is visible while you place teams.

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.

76
Teams in the field
across 16 seed lines
20
Undo steps
Ctrl/Cmd+Z, safe to experiment
5
Saved slots
compare different theories of the field

How to Build a Bracket

01
Start from Auto-Seed or a blank board
Auto-Seed fills every line by current NET ranking, which gets the bulk of the field roughly right before you start making judgment calls. It is a full-board overwrite, so run it before any manual placements rather than after.
02
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.
03
Compare teams head to head
Add up to 8 teams to the Compare pane 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.
04
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.
05
Save, undo, and share
Bracket Studio saves automatically to your browser, with up to 5 named slots so you can keep multiple 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.

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. 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 current NET ranking. It overwrites the whole board, so treat it as a starting point rather than 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.

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.

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.