Crunch time of the 2024-25 men's college basketball season has officially arrived, with about 50 days until the power-conference tournaments tip off -- even sooner for the mid-majors -- and only a little longer than that before Selection Sunday on March 16. That means it's time to track which teams are on course to make the NCAA tournament, continuing the fine tradition of Bubble Watch here at ESPN. We'll be launching that column in full force starting on Feb. 4, but right now we want to give a preview of which teams are probably safe and which ones should be worried about their tourney status down the stretch of the regular season.
As usual for Bubble Watch, we'll break teams down by conference into categories based on their projected NCAA tournament status. This year, however, we'll be largely basing the categories on ESPN Analytics' BPI forecast, which gives each team a probability to make the tourney after simulating the remainder of the season 10,000 times.
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 between 70% and 95% -- 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 is either between 30-70% tourney odds per BPI, 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 a notable probability across a variety of different tourney models beyond just the BPI forecast. (This is our fail-safe for catching teams that BPI might be too low on.)
As of Tuesday, Jan. 20, there are 19 teams marked as Locks, led by the Duke Blue Devils, Houston Cougars and Auburn Tigers -- each effectively at 100%. (I say "effectively" because these probabilities are capped at >99% until a bid is actually clinched.) That leaves 41 more teams in either the Should Be In or Work To Do categories, and these are our bubble schools.
So let's go conference by conference -- in rough order of which conferences project to get the most NCAA bids -- and run through who they are, where they stand and what they need to do to boost their odds. We'll also pick out one school per conference whose odds are close to 50-50, spotlighting them as a true embodiment of our Bubble Watch column, and another team that the various models seem to be confused about right now.
Jump to a conference:
SEC | Big Ten
Big 12 | ACC | Big East
High Mid-Majors | Low Mid-Majors
SEC
Much has been made about how dominant the SEC is this season, and that success will be reflected when the selection committee convenes in mid-March.