Brad Wachtel’s NCAA Men’s 2026 Tournament Bracket

I thought this year was going to be a relatively easy year in terms of what teams would be included in the NCAA Tournament. Every year I end up feeling the same way. I want to do better. All in all, I did well at projecting the bracket. I correctly picked 68/68 teams, had 46 teams seeds exact and had 67/68 teams within one seed. My only real gripe with seeding this year was Vanderbilt being given a No. 5 seed. I thought they should have been a No. 3 seed, but I would have been ok if it was even a 4 seed. The Commodores advanced to the SEC Tournament finals while being one of the hottest teams in the country in Florida. Their overall metrics were far better than a team with a 5 seed.

With that being said, when it came down to it, my last minute decisions to flip St. John’s and Kansas, Saint Mary’s and Clemson and Kennesaw State and Tennessee State proved to be a mistake. While things like this happen, the great part is that I will learn from what I got wrong and improve for next season. When it came down to it, the selection committee felt like St. John’s didn’t do enough in nonconference play and the Big East as a whole was down. Hard to argue with that. I just thought there might be some reward for a team with better metrics than Kansas and the fact that the Johnnies won the Big East regular season and Big East Tournament.

The biggest issue I faced with seeding teams was on the 8/9 lines. I had a few of these teams flipped. It appeared in many of these cases, the team with the better predictive metrics ended up as the better seed. Again, no complaints. I thought the selection committee did a really good job at providing clarity, transparency and making sure to include all of the conference tournament results (except maybe Vanderbilt) like they said they would do.