Who's in, who's out, and who's on the bubble for the 12-team field -- recomputed live from this site's own national rating and conference data.
If the season ended today. Field: the ACC/Big 12/Big Ten/SEC champions + the highest-ranked Group-of-Six team + Notre Dame if ranked top 12, plus at-large teams to fill 12 -- seeded 1-12 by this site's own rankings (half record vs. schedule, half power rating; there is no human selection committee here). Seeds 1-4 get a first-round bye. Every round below is simulated forward with this site's own matchup projection, all the way to a projected national champion -- a matchup marked "ADVANCES (seed default)" means there isn't enough completed-game data yet for either side to project, so the better seed carries forward without a fabricated score.
| SEED | TEAM | RATING | SOS | QUALIFIED AS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 BYE | 66.0 | 43.9 | At-large | |
| 2 BYE | 70.5 | 44.6 | Big Ten champion | |
| 3 BYE | 65.2 | 52.4 | At-large | |
| 4 BYE | 62.9 | 36.6 | ACC champion | |
| 5 | 50.5 | 49.9 | At-large | |
| 6 | 62.0 | 54.8 | At-large | |
| 7 | 67.5 | 41.1 | Notre Dame (ranked top 12) | |
| 8 | 65.9 | 43.3 | SEC champion | |
| 9 | 55.2 | 43.4 | At-large | |
| 10 | 61.8 | 49.7 | At-large | |
| 11 | 61.3 | 40.5 | Big 12 champion | |
| 12 | 49.6 | 41.8 | Group of Six, highest ranked |
| TEAM | RATING | SOS | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -- | 49.6 | 43.5 | Next in line | |
| -- | 59.0 | 45.4 | Next in line | |
| -- | 59.4 | 44.8 | Next in line | |
| -- | 57.6 | 39.4 | Next in line |
Teams are ranked and seeded by the same blend of this season's record against its schedule and power rating that /rankings uses; RATING is the power rating. SOS here is a plain average of a team's played opponents' ratings (not the recency-weighted term inside the model itself) -- shown for context, not used to pick the field. "Conference champion" is a PROJECTION, not simply whoever holds the best record today: every remaining in-conference game is simulated jointly (one shared coin flip per game, not each team guessing independently) thousands of times to build a full projected conference standings table each time, and then -- since all 4 of these conferences settle their title with a championship game between the top 2 teams in that standings table, not simply by record -- ONE MORE game is simulated between whichever two teams finish 1st/2nd in conference record that run, at a neutral site (no home-field edge for either side). That title game's winner, not just the better regular-season conference record, is the conference champion shown here, with how often it happened across every simulation next to its name. Still a disclosed proxy: this library tracks no REAL title-game result, only this simulated one, and the "projected final record" figures shown elsewhere on this site (the bracket's own "proj. final W-L" line, for instance) do NOT yet include this extra game for whichever teams reach it -- a real, separate follow-up.
