NCAA Tournament
2027
Mar 17 to Apr 4
Overview
Format
- 76 teams in four regions, each seeded 1 to 16.
- Opening Round: twelve games decide the last twelve places in the bracket.
- First round, in every region: 1 plays 16, 8 plays 9, 5 plays 12, 4 plays 13, 6 plays 11, 3 plays 14, 7 plays 10, and 2 plays 15.
- One game decides each round, through the second round, the Sweet 16 and the Elite Eight. The four region winners meet in the Final Four, and the two semifinal winners play for the national championship.
How the field is picked
A selection committee picks and seeds the field on Selection Sunday. Every conference tournament champion gets in, and the committee chooses the at-large teams from the rest.
Its main sorting tool is the NET, the NCAA's own ranking of every Division I team. The NET is computed from games: who a team played, where, how efficiently, and who won.
Each team's sheet sorts its results into four quadrants by the opponent's NET and where the game was played. Quad 1 games are the hardest to win.
The sheet also shows Wins Above Bubble: how many games a team won compared with what a bubble team would win against the same schedule.
Selection rewards the whole season. Seeding looks at how a team is playing now.
The AP Top 25 and the Coaches Poll are votes by writers and coaches. The committee does not use them to pick or seed the field.