NCAA Bracket 2025: Latest Expert Bracketology and Predictions for Men's Tourney

The college basketball regular season is in the books, and conference tournament season is in full swing.

Bids all across the board for the upcoming NCAA Tournament remain up for grabs. Championship week will decide where they go.

Not-locked-in No. 1 seed candidates will keep a close eye on the SEC Tournament, which could spring Florida, Tennessee or Alabama to a No. 1 seed. Bubble teams, meanwhile, will continue tracking all conference tournament winners and hoping that chalk mostly prevails, since bid stealers can cut into the number of at-large invitations available.

There is still so much to be sorted out ahead of Selection Sunday, but expert bracketologists already have hunches of how things will shake out. We'll peer into their predictions in search of answers for some of the selection committee's biggest questions.

Who Gets the Final No. 1 Seed?

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Auburn might have wobbled a tiny bit down the stretch, but the Tigers should be the top overall seed. Duke won't be far behind, and Houston should round out this talented trio of No. 1 seeds who won't have to sweat out the upcoming week.

There are, of course, four No. 1 seeds available, though, so that leaves the last one in play. As CBS Sports' Jerry Palm opined, the SEC Tournament might determine whether Florida, Tennessee, Alabama or Michigan State gets the final spot.

"I believe that if one of the three SEC teams wins the conference tournament, that team will be the fourth No. 1 seed," Palm wrote. "If none of them win it, that opens the door for the Spartans to make a run at the top line."

Palm is among the experts that currently has Florida in that final No. 1 spot, but it's sort of a placeholder, since teams are so tightly bunched heading into Championship Week.

Who Just Makes the Cut?

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Breathing easy isn't possible on the bubble. However, there are teams on the fringes of the tournament picture in better position than others.

Things can and will change over the coming week, but there are some agreements for now about the final teams to crack this tournament feel.

All three of Palm, ESPN's Joe Lunardi and Fox Sports' Mike DeCourcy, for instance, have Xavier among their final four teams in the tournament. Two of the three experts also align on Baylor (DeCourcy and Palm), Ohio State (DeCourcy and Lunardi) and San Diego State (Lunardi and Palm).

The other schools included in this group by only one expert are Indiana (DeCourcy), Oklahoma (Lunardi) and Boise State (Palm). Indiana and Oklahoma are tournament teams for the two other experts, but Boise State was left out of the party by DeCourcy and Lunardi.

Who Gets Left Out?

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Again, there's a chance any team mentioned here might change its fate yet, but things aren't looking great at the moment.

Some bubbles will burst over the coming week, and these experts all believe that could be the case for North Carolina. The Tar Heels, who had a six-game winning streak snapped by Duke on Saturday, are the among the first four schools out of the tournament for all three bracketologists.

The experts are also effectively in agreement on Dayton, which wound up among the first four out for DeCourcy and Palm and the next four out for Lunardi. Texas was in a similar spot, making the first four out for DeCourcy and Lunardi and simply being excluded from Palm's predictions.