Back to the Top News Newsfeed

Bracket Watch: Who Opens the Season in SI's Men's NCAA Tournament Field?

College basketball season is here, and there’s no better way to get excited about what’s to come than looking ahead to March Madness. Of course, the NCAA tournament is a party that teams get invited based on their résumés, résumés that haven’t begun to be formed yet. So in this preseason edition of Bracket Watch, we’ll use Sports Illustrated's 1–358 rankings to build a seed list and then place the teams according to bracketing principles.

With that methodology comes a few caveats. The aim of the 1–358 rankings was to predict who would qualitatively be the best teams in the sport.