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Bubble Watch 2025: Men's NCAA tournament locks by conference

Wake Forest's Hunter Sallis scored 20 points, but Florida State roared back to beat its ACC foe for the Seminoles' first Quad 1 victory of their season. Jim Dedmon/Imagn Images

ESPN's Bubble Watch, a projection of the teams vying for bids into the 2025 men's college basketball tournament, launched a little over a week ago, and we heard your feedback about some teams that were too high in ESPN Analytics' BPI forecast (ahem, North Carolina) and others that might not have been receiving odds reflective of their quality wins (see, Louisville).

You'll notice that Wednesday's version of Bubble Watch -- a file we've been updating and will continue to do so from now until Selection Sunday on March 16 -- looks a bit different, with new odds and a few teams that moved into different tiers. Upon further investigation, ESPN Analytics discovered there was an issue within the BPI forecast that affected the way the model was processing each team's chances, including the way it was taking in NET data in order to generate quad wins/losses.

ESPN Analytics has corrected the data. In the previous column update, 22 teams were listed as locks and 38 total teams were listed as on the bubble. Now there are 29 teams that are locks -- including Louisville, Maryland and Memphis -- and 32 teams on the bubble. (This includes UNC, which is now holding on for its tourney life.) Other teams that had previously been on the bubble -- most notably Northwestern, Iowa and Villanova -- are now absent, having dropped below the probability threshold in the updated model.

We realize these are big changes, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Our hope is you'll bookmark and follow along with every odds change as we look ahead to less than a month until the conference tournaments tip off -- and just a little longer than that before Selection Sunday.

For background, we'll break teams down by conference into categories based on their projected NCAA tournament status.

Teams with Lock status have at least a 95% chance to make the tournament, according to the BPI forecast. (Yes, this means that 5% of the time, a team marked as a lock will miss the tourney. We set the threshold there as a nod to the traditional standard for significance testing.)

A team marked Should Be In has a BPI probability from 70% to 94%. These are teams that, most likely, will get into the field of 68, though their fates are not completely assured yet.

And a team with the Work To Do tag has either 25% to 69% tourney odds per BPI, or is featured in ESPN's most recent Bracketology column by Joe Lunardi -- who, let's be honest, probably knows better than the algorithm -- or has at least a 10% chance to make the tourney conditional on not getting an automatic bid. We'll mark these Bracketology teams with an asterisk. (This is our fail-safe for catching teams that BPI might be too low on.) The percentages will be more accurate the closer we get to Selection Sunday, as teams' bodies of work become more solidified.

One other note -- the ESPN Analytics model is a predictive forecast, meaning it is not representative of whether a team would make the tournament if its season ended today, but rather gives each team a probability to make the tourney after simulating the remainder of the season 10,000 times.

Here is our current projection of the bubble:

Auto-bids available (conference champs): 31 teams
At-large bids available: 37 teams
Locks: 29 teams
The Bubble: 32 total teams
Should be in: 9 teams
Work to do: 23 teams

With all of that preamble out of the way, let's get back to the rundown of teams -- conference by conference -- in order of which conferences project to get the most NCAA bids. The teams are listed in order within each category based on their chances to get a tourney bid.

Notes: All times are Eastern Time. SOR = strength of record. SOS = strength of schedule. NET rankings = The NCAA's official evaluation tool, which is the recommended rating for the committee to look at. SRS = Simple Rating System. WAB = Wins Above Bubble, a team's extra wins beyond what a typical bubble team would have against its schedule.

Jump to a conference:
SEC | Big Ten
Big 12 | ACC | Big East
Mid-majors

SEC

Locks (95% tourney chance):