2026 Bracketology Watch
What's shaping the field this season. I update it as the year goes.
The season has tipped off, and real bubble talk can't start until the committee's résumé metrics show up in December. The bigger news right now is structural anyway: this is the first season of the 76-team field, and the conference map just got redrawn again.
The 76-team field arrives
The 2026-27 season is the first to use the 76-team format: 32 automatic qualifiers and 44 at-large bids, with the added capacity landing mostly on lines 10 through 16. The Opening Round replaces the First Four, running 12 games over two days, six each in Dayton and Wichita, on March 16 and 17 before the 64-team bracket starts on the 18th.
Every tool here is already set up for 76 teams, so nothing changes as the season goes on. This is just the first year that setup describes a real tournament.
The map moved on July 1
Realignment reshaped college basketball again this offseason. The Pac-12 reforms as a nine-team basketball league, with Boise State, Fresno State, Colorado State, San Diego State and Utah State arriving from the Mountain West, Texas State from the Sun Belt, and Gonzaga from the WCC, joining holdovers Oregon State and Washington State. The Mountain West backfilled with Hawai'i and UC Davis from the Big West plus UTEP from Conference USA. The WCC added Denver from the Summit League to replace Gonzaga, its longtime headline program.
Gonzaga's move is the one that matters most for bracketology. A team that spent years as a projected 1 or 2 seed inside a mid-major league now plays its whole non-marquee schedule in a reconstituted Pac-12, which changes both its strength of schedule and how many bids that league can expect.
Team-level data feeds across the sport, this site included, can lag the new conference alignments early in a season. Check any team's listed conference against its 2026-27 schedule in the first few weeks.
Where the preseason numbers have teams
Teams have played a few games, so the ranking signals are still mostly projections built from returning production and last season's results. Ken Pomeroy's preseason KenPom ratings came out October 12, and ESPN's BPI has since taken over as the preseason rating the forecast uses. As of November 6, BPI has Duke first, then Florida, Illinois, Texas and Tennessee. KenPom had Duke, Florida, Houston, Illinois and Arizona in its preseason ratings, so the two agree on the top two and on Illinois, and split on the rest of the top five.
Treat both as a starting point. NET, quad records and strength of schedule do not exist yet and will not until the season is underway. Bracket Studio ranked the field by KenPom's ratings until ESPN published this season's BPI. It now ranks by BPI, with KenPom still there to sort and Auto-Seed by, and it switches to full NET-based committee criteria automatically when the data source changes in December. The Studio keeps only KenPom's rank and net rating; the full ratings, tempo, efficiency and every team's page are at kenpom.com.
What to watch for next
Not much moves in November. After that, things happen in roughly this order. Non-conference scheduling reveals which contenders built a résumé they can defend in March. NET arrives in early December and every quadrant record starts from scratch. By mid-February the field mostly sorts itself, and the last two weeks come down to the 10 or 12 teams nobody's sure about.
Where the women's field stands
The realignment above happened at the institution level, so it reshaped the women's game the same way it reshaped the men's: Gonzaga's move into the reformed Pac-12 changes the women's schedule and strength of schedule too. The conference map is the same for both sports.
The preseason picture does differ, because a different set of teams is good. The AP preseason poll, released October 20, has South Carolina first, then UConn and USC, followed by Duke and Michigan. ESPN's preseason Top 25 also has USC third. Last spring's Final Four also had Texas and UCLA, but the AP has Texas sixth and UCLA outside its top ten. Like the men's rankings above, these polls rest on returning production and last season's results.
One gap: the men's tab uses KenPom and ESPN's BPI as preseason stand-ins before NET exists. There is no equivalent early-season source for the women's game, so Bracket Studio's women's tab currently shows last season's field until this year's NET data comes online in December. The data doesn't exist yet. See How the Women's Field Gets Built for the criteria themselves. My women's bracket publishes on the forecast page; there's no scored women's record yet, because no women's season of mine has been graded.
I update this page each year instead of starting a new one. For the mechanics behind the field, see How the Field Gets Built or, for the women's process, How the Women's Field Gets Built. To build and score your own bracket, head to NCAA Basketball.