gotchanewsdaily.com 
Selection Sunday one day away, and conference tournaments are winding down, with the another wave of automatic bids already locked in and Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology in full swing.
As of now, according to ESPN Analytics’ tournament forecast model, 34 teams have achieved at least a 95% chance to make the tournament, and seven others are in solid shape (70-95%). But that leaves 20 teams sitting between 25% and 69% odds, their fates still uncertain.
What’s on tap for Saturday? For one thing, 12 different auto-bids will be secured, many of which could change the composition of the bubble for teams hoping to get an at-large nod. The biggest games to watch in that regard are UC Irvine-UC San Diego in the Big West title game and Colorado State-Boise State for the Mountain West, with an eye on Liberty-Jacksonville State in C-USA championship. Key semifinals to watch include VCU and Loyola-Chicago facing off in the Atlantic-10 and North Texas meeting UAB in the American tournament.
Read on for our breakdowns of each bubble team by conference and current category (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 anywhere from 25% to 69% tourney odds per the BPI, or is featured in ESPN’s most recent Bracketology by 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 the 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:
Total auto-bids available (conference tournament champs): 17 of 31 bids are available
Clinched auto-bids (14 teams): SIU Edwardsville, High Point, Lipscomb, Drake, Omaha, Wofford, Troy, St. Francis (PA), Robert Morris, UNC Wilmington, Gonzaga, McNeese, American University, Montana
At-large bids available: 37 teams
Locks: 34 teams
The Bubble: 27 total teams
Should be in: 7 teams
Work to do: 20 teams
Here’s the rundown of teams — conference by conference — in order of which conferences projects to get the most NCAA bids. And we’ve listed expected number of bids for each of the power conferences. The teams are listed in order within each category based on their chances to get a tourney bid.
Notes: All times are Eastern. 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 | Others
SEC (12.4 expected bids)
Locks (95% tourney chance)
