We’re in the midst of progressing from daily bracketology to…well, not hourly, but more often than daily. Here’s a breakdown of what to expect from our model tomorrow. All times are estimated.
10:00 AM Eastern: Overnight Updates Complete
Our standard bracketology update going into the last day, still using proxies for the prior day’s NET/KPI/SOR changes.
5:45 PM Eastern: Final NCAAT Bracketology, Semi-Final NIT Bracketology
These final updates will still use proxies to account for NET/KPI/SOR changes from the last five games (Big Ten Championship, SEC Championship, AAC Championship, A-10 Championship, Patriot League Championship), but will have the real updates from Saturday’s action. They’ll be posted prior to the Selection Show at 6:00 PM Eastern.
7:00 PM Eastern: Final NIT Bracketology
Once we have the NCAA Tournament field, we’ll adjust our NIT Bracketology accordingly in preparation for the 8:30 PM EDT Selection Show. If opt-outs are being announced throughout the day, we’ll try to keep the page updated live (with notation about which opt-outs we’re accounting for), but we don’t want to go off of rumors if it can be avoided, and it’s such an unknown situation that we’re prepared to adjust based on what’s happening live.
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Another note on how we’ll be running our model itself: Since we aren’t releasing percentage probabilities of selection this year, we won’t need to run simulations to game out the impact of Sunday’s five games. Instead, we’ll be able to just plug the results and our proxies’ interpretation of them into the model’s selection formula to line the teams up in case of each of the 32 possible combinations of results. These lineups will be extremely similar, and to be completely honest, we’ve debated whether to adjust our model to just stick with the Sunday morning bracketology and adjust from there, or to even do the same starting with Saturday morning, since so much of the committee’s work is done earlier in the week. But because we built the model off final team sheets, we use final team sheets for now. Next year may, of course, be different, after an offseason of improvements.
