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The brackets for the 2025 NCAA Tournament were announced Sunday night, and no more than 10 minutes later you received a flood of texts and emails from friends and family asking you to join their bracket pool.
As if you needed to be asked? You join every year! And, like almost everybody who joins a bracket pool, you lose every year. Winning a bracket pool isn’t easy, and it takes a lot of luck. There’s a skill to it as well, though.
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While having a strategy can’t guarantee success, there are a few ways to increase your odds. Whether you’ve been following college basketball all season and know the teams inside and out, or you just showed up this week with a printed bracket ready to cram for a final by Thursday morning, here are a few tried and true methods.
First things first, you have to pick the winner correctly. The way scoring is set up in most bracket pools, picking the champion is an absolute necessity. You might have gone 30 for 32 in the first round, but if you don’t pick the right winner, you’ll be telling all your friends about it as you finish in fifth place. So make sure that, at the end of the day, the team you have winning it all is a legit contender to win it all. Don’t try to get too cute with it by picking that mid-major darling everybody loves who spent all season playing the Southwest Oklahoma Territory Techs of the world.
NCAA bracket 2025: Ranking every March Madness tournament first-round game from No. 1 to No. 32
That said, you don’t want to be too obvious. There’s an art to this. If you’re in a small pool, you can win by being basic and sticking primarily to chalk. However, if you’re in a large pool (think 50+ entrants), you want to be a bit contrarian. Pick a team that’s capable of winning it all, but try to pick one that won’t be the most popular choice.
A lot of people will be picking Duke, Auburn, Florida, or maybe even Houston. You know, the No. 1 seeds. So if you pick one of them and they win the tournament, your odds of winning decrease and will come down to how well you did in the early rounds. Instead, consider picking a 2, 3 or even a 4 seed that is underseeded. For example, Texas Tech is a 3-seed in the tournament, but according to KenPom — an advanced metrics site that ranks teams on their likelihood of winning games — the Red Raiders are the seventh-best team in the country. They’re ranked ahead of 2-seeds like Michigan State and St. Johns. Tech’s odds of winning it all may not be great, but neither are your odds of winning the pool. If the Red Raiders do manage to pull it off, though, you’ll have a significant advantage over the rest of your pool.
Finally, I know this goes against some of the fun of March Madness, but don’t go crazy picking upsets. You see it immediately after the bracket is announced. Everybody immediately begins looking for that 12-seed to make a Cinderella run because they want to be able to say, “I told you so!”
Trust me, we all do it, but the reality is that while we remember the Cinderella stories of the first weekend, they don’t typically go much further than that. Bracket pools are formatted so that you get more points by picking the correct winners later in the tournament. If you pick High Point to upset Purdue in the first round and then beat Clemson in the second to get to the Sweet 16, and they do so, it feels great, but you only earned three points. If you have them knocking off Houston in the Sweet 16, but they don’t, and Houston gets to the Final Four, that’s a lot of points you’ve thrown away to the competition trying to correctly predict something that would happen less than 1% of the time.
So find a few double-digit seeds you believe are underrated and pick them to win a game or two at most. Just don’t pick five of them. Personally, I try to stick to two and never more than three. If you aren’t sure which games you should consider for possible upsets, I’ve got great news for you.
We know and are happy to share.
No. 12 Colorado State over No. 5 Memphis
Cameron Salerno: This will be a popular upset pick among experts because if you look at point spreads, Colorado State is favored over Memphis. The Rams should be, too, because they’ve proven to be the slightly better team this season. While the selection committee doesn’t concern itself as much with predictive metrics, the fact of the matter is Colorado State finished second in the Mountain West regular season, then won the Mountain West tournament, and the Mountain West is a much tougher league than the American Athletic Conference. Memphis played a terrific nonconference slate, and wins over Michigan State and Clemson helped it get a 5-seed, but those games were a long time ago. Memphis hasn’t faced a team as strong as Colorado State since 2024.
Colorado State has been playing elimination games since the Mountain West Tournament. Colorado State would have been left out of the NCAA Tournament had it lost to Boise State in the MWC title game. Colorado State’s success starts with star wing Nique Clifford. The 6-foot-5 forward is averaging 19 points, 9.7 rebounds and 4.4 assists per game. Clifford is also Colorado State’s best defender, which means he could be guarding Memphis star PJ Haggerty, the third-leading scorer in the country. Another reason to pick the Rams is the uncertainty around Memphis guard Tyrese Hunter’s status for the NCAA Tournament. Hunter suffered a foot injury in the AAC Tournament and missed the conference title game win over UAB last weekend. Without Hunter’s scoring punch in the lineup, Clifford will have one less player to worry about.
NCAA bracket 2025: Best seed upsets to target in this year’s tournament based on previous trends
No. 10 New Mexico over No. 7 Marquette
Salerno: The Mountain West got as many teams into the tournament as the ACC this year, and it deserved so because, overall, they’re similar leagues. The difference is one has Duke. The other difference is the amount of respect shown to the leagues based on how the committee seeded them. All four Mountain West teams are double-digit seeds, and both of my upset picks come from these under-seeded squads! It’s never a bad thing to be coached by a Pitino in March like the Lobos (coached by Richard Pitino, Rick’s son) are, and while I respect Shaka Smart and Marquette, the Eagles enter the dance having lost three of their last four and seven of their last 12.
New Mexico loves to push the pace. Star guard Donovan Dent is a high-volume scorer in transition, and his team ranked as the fifth-fastest team in the country in time per possession (15.1). Marquette ranked in the 90th percentile per KenPom in transition defense. If New Mexico and Dent can push the pace in this game, the Lobos should be able to pull off an upset and advance to the second round. I highlighted why New Mexico is a sleeper team to reach the Sweet 16 earlier this week.
No. 12 Liberty over No. 5 Oregon
David Cobb: Liberty took down No. 5 seed Mississippi State in the first round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament and is well-positioned for another upset in this year’s first round. The Flames, in their 10th year under Ritchie McKay, are flamethrowers. They rank No. 13 nationally in made 3-pointers per game at 10.6 and No. 6 in 3-point percentage at 39%. This is one of the nation’s best passing teams, meaning Oregon will have its hands full defensively. If Liberty gets hot, it will resemble No. 15 seed Oral Roberts, which reached the 2021 Sweet 16 with a combined 21 made 3-pointers in wins over Ohio State and Florida.
No. 12 UC San Diego over No. 5 Michigan
Cobb: UC San Diego busted down the door to the NCAA Tournament in its first season of eligibility following the NCAA-mandated four-year transition process to Division I. The Tritons have won 15 straight games — more than anyone else in the field — and are this bracket’s analytics darling. KenPom ranks UCSD at No. 36, ahead of single-digit seeds like Creighton, Oklahoma and Memphis. The Tritons force 16 turnovers per game, which makes them a hellacious first-round matchup for turnover-prone Michigan.
