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The deliberations among the Men’s NCAA Tournament selection committee remain mostly private each year, with only a few interviews done by its chair each year on Selection Sunday serving as the only official rationale for who’s in, who’s out and where every team is seeded for March Madness.
The 2026 NCAA Tournament is shaping up to be a fascinating bracket, as season-long favorites appear headed for a No. 1 seed and a particularly soft bubble filled with iffy resumes comes into focus ahead of Selection Sunday. Like last season, the selection committee will have seven metrics based on computer models and formulas listed on its team sheets and how each is weighed can be a point of contention that has lasting impact given the importance NCAA tournament performance has on the overall perception of a program.
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Each ranking or rating is separated into two distinct categories — predictive metrics and results-based metrics. The NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), KenPom, ESPN’s BPI and the Torvik rankings are considered predictive rankings that measure how good a team is based on its offensive and defensive efficiency, adjusted for opponent strength and location. The KPI, ESPN’s Strength of Record (SOR) and Wins Above Bubble (WAB) are results-based rankings that judge how hard it was for a team to attain its résumé.
For many teams, the two types of ratings largely converge by the end of the regular season. For others, however, there can be a wide swath of outcomes based on how a game was played and whether it was won or lost. These are the schools from major and mid-major conferences that often inspire the most robust conversation and debate among committee members, either over their selection into the NCAA tournament field as an at-large bid and/or their potential seeding.
Here are 10 teams with the most at stake heading into Selection Sunday based on their polarizing rankings among the metrics used by the NCAA Tournament selection committee:
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