2025 March Madness

The model has a few smaller changes for 2025. 

All-Time Tournament Ranking Data

All-Time Tournament Ranking data has been added, to elevate high ranking teams at each seed. For example, in 2023, Florida Atlantic was the #13 ranked 9 seed since 2002. That gave them an advantage in the tournament, especially since 1 Purdue lost to 16 Fairleigh Dickinson in their Round of 64 game.

"Chalkiness" Factor for Region

I have found a metric that correlates how "chalky" a region may be. It will help predict if the 1 seed or 2 seed makes it to the Final Four, or if a relative underdog may upset the top ranked teams.

2025 March Madness Guide

Any user that buys the premium bracket picks will also receive  the 2025 March Madness Guide.

The 2025 March Madness Guide was something I created for Reddit users on r/collegebasketball. I had posted my Final Four picks from Joe Lunardi's ESPN weekly and bi-weekly bracketology, but I thought they would like to see more on what the NerdBracket.com model tabulated.

Hopefully, this guide can help you pick your bracket with more insight from the work I have done on the model.

The guide gives the percentage that teams will win at the particular game slot, based on the NerdBracket.com model. For example, in the picture above, Auburn has a 100% chance of winning its Sweet Sixteen game. Arizona has a 43.3% chance, Drake has a 32.6% chance, again, according to the NerdBracket.com model. People on Reddit r/collegebasketball had a hard time with those figures at times. "What do you mean, Auburn has a 100% chance to win that game? No one has a 100% chance of winning anything!" But this is according to the model, and not actual mathematical probabilibity.

I have corresponded with university analytics professors, trying to find better ways of modeling the March Madness tournament. On the website, I say that no one has worked harder than me to create a good March Madness model. Well, someone, I'll call him George, took exception to that on Twitter X. Once I got past George's gruff comments challenging me on this statement, I learned that he has been working on his model for 37 years! We emailed and started talking about our methods. While they are not the same, our methods are very similar in our approaches. 

George has had a lot of success in March Madness pools over the years. He said that he has been accused of entering his brackets after the Thursday cutoff. He has been blackballed from other pools. Him talking about his approach and me talking about mine has given me renewed confidence in my model.