96 Team Bracketology w/ NKY’s Twist

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NKY Bracketology

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January 2, 2024

First and foremost, I don’t necessarily believe this would work like this, but this is my idea of how it would work! I’ll open a forum on this site so you all can put your ideas on here, or as always, I’m available on Twitter @BracketNKY. Let me know what you all think; I had several requests for this over the last couple of weeks! I apologize for how long it took to come out!

96 team bracket added criteria:

The top 24 conferences get 2 AQs: Conference tournament and regular season champ. The bottom 8 will get an AQ into the NIT if it is a different winner. The tournament champ will decide the AQ from the bottom 8 conferences.
In the case of one team sweeping the regular season and conference tournament, the runner-up for the regular season gets it.
NET ranking for conferences will decide conference rankings.
One really fun thing is that NET rankings can change throughout champ week, resulting in AQ movement until selection Sunday.
ALL conference championship games will end by Saturday night, allowing the committee time to evaluate all teams after all games have been played and give us a bracket on Sunday night.
If a team sweeps the regular/conference tournament, they then get an automatic bye into the round of 64.
Each bracket region is broken into pods. The first three rounds are at the same pod, then the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 are neutral, as well as FF/championship.
The top 4 seeds remain the “Protected” seeds; and will each host a pod.
I believe that this would incentivize schools to be for this because it would be a money-making proposition for the school and the city.
If there’s a situation where a team may host games at more than one arena, it’s up to the school & NCAA to decide which is best to host.
Rematches from the regular season cannot happen in the 1/2 rounds but can after that.
The AQ’s who earn a bye but aren’t a top 4 seed will be placed into the bracket starting with the five seed.
This bracket broke down to have 14 AQ’s with a bye who were in my true seed line under a 4 seed, so they filled 14/16 of the 5-8 seed line groupings, bumping teams down several seed lines to make this happen.
Yes, this is completely unlikely to happen like this, but in my opinion, it’s the best way to reward teams to compete in both the regular season and conference play.
NO play-in games; all teams are in or out.
NCAA Seed List effectively gives us 1-17 seeds when eliminating the play-in games, and it is what I used for seeding. I seeded 1-12.5 in order of NCAA selection this year, then the at-larges started.
I had to add in 15 at-large teams into the bracket, meaning we also added in 13 AQ’s.
This # feels like it splits between the large and smaller schools to help balance it out.