As of the morning of December 31st, 2016, there have been a total of 2,394 games played by the 351 NCAA division I teams. This means that we are approximately 45% of the 2015-16 season completed. On December 29th, conference play started to take off across the 36 conferences as the American, ACC, Big East, Big Ten, and Mountain West conferences started playing within their conferences.

March Madness Current Entrants:

Using the current games played, the locations of the games, and the disparity of scores, we are able to build out a current state of the 2016 March Madness Tournament.

Rules: In order to make the tournament, a team must win their conference tournament, win the Ivy League regular season, or become an “at-large” bid that is selected based on merit by an NCAA committee.

In this post, we give an updated rankings for all 351 NCAA Division I teams. But first, we identify the current teams on pace (projected by our models) for becoming conference champions and “at-large” bids.

It should be noted that our rankings will include the suspended Southern Methodist University, whereas the AP Top 25 Coaches’ Poll does not include the Mustangs.

Fitting our models, we find that there is a 0.6767 r-squared, indicating a fairly good fit to the games played.

1. America East: Stony Brook (9-4, 0-0)
2. American: Cincinnati (10-4, 0-1)
3. Atlantic 10: Dayton (10-2, 0-0)
4. Atlantic Coast: Louisville (11-2, 0-0)
5. Atlantic Sun: North Florida (10-6, 0-0)
6. Big 12: Oklahoma (11-0, 0-0)
7. Big East: Xavier (12-0, 0-0)
8. Big Sky: Weber State (8-5, 0-0)
9. Big South: High Point (9-4, 2-0)
10. Big Ten: Purdue (13-1, 0-0)
11. Big West: Hawaii (10-2, 0-0)
12. Colonial Athletic: UNC – Wilmington (8-3, 0-0)
13. Conference USA:  Old Dominion (7-6, 0-0)
14. Horizon League: Valparaiso (10-3, 0-0)
15. Ivy League: Yale (6-5, 0-0)
16. Metro Atlantic: Monmouth (9-4, 1-1)
17. Mid-American: Akron (10-2, 0-0)
18. Mid-Eastern: Norfolk State (5-9, 1-0)
19. Missouri Valley: Wichita State (6-5, 0-0)
20. Mountain West: San Diego State (8-6, 1-0)
21. Northeast: Wagner (7-4, 0-0)
22. Ohio Valley: Murray State (6-7, 0-0)
23. Pac-12: Arizona (12-1, 0-0)
24. Patriot League: Army (10-3, 1-0)
25. Southeastern: South Carolina (12-0, 0-0)
26. Southern: Chattanooga (11-2, 0-0)
27. Southland: Texas A&M Corpus Christi (9-3, 0-0)
28. Southwestern Athletic: Southern (8-5, 0-0)
29. Summit League: South Dakota State (11-3, 0-0)
30. Sun Belt: UT – Arlington (10-2, 1-0)
31. West Coast: St. Mary’s (11-1, 2-0)
32. Western Athletic: Grand Canyon (12-2, 0-0)

The remaining 36 “at-large” teams are then the top 36 teams in our rankings. These 36 teams are given as:

1. Michigan State (13-1)
2. West Virginia (11-1)
3. Kansas (11-1)
4. Virginia (11-1)
5. Villanova (10-2)
6. Vanderbilt (8-4)
7. Miami (FL) (11-1)
8. Pittsburgh (11-1)
9. Duke (11-2)
10. Butler (11-1)
11. North Carolina (12-2)
12. Iowa (10-3)
13. Michigan (11-3)
14. Texas A&M (10-2)
15. Florida (8-4)
16. Kentucky (10-2)
17. Connecticut (9-3)
18. USC (11-2)
19. Gonzaga (10-3)
20. Texas Tech (10-1)
21. Iowa State (11-1)
22. Maryland (12-1)
23. Indiana (11-3)
24. Baylor (10-2)
25. Texas (8-4)
26. California (10-3)
27. Oregon (11-2)
28. Colorado (11-2)
29. Kansas State (10-2)
30. Utah (11-2)
31. Ohio State (9-5)
32. Providence (12-1)
33. Northwestern (13-1)
34. Seton Hall (11-2)
35. Georgia (7-3)
36. UCLA (9-4)

The next set of teams are our current bubble teams. These are teams that are close to making the NCAA Tournament but are on the outside looking in.

1. Memphis (9-3)
2. Notre Dame (9-3)
3. Stanford (7-4)
4. Arizona State (10-3)
5. George Washington (11-2)
6. Arkansas – Little Rock (11-1)
7. Richmond (8-4)
8. VCU (8-5)
9. Florida State (10-2)
10. Syracuse (10-4)

The current state of the NCAA Tournament is given as follows:

NCAA March Madness seedings based on rankings as of December 31st, 2016.

We note that we are not predicting the field of 68, but rather giving seedings based on play up to today. Our goal is to populate the March Madness tournament with current seedings; to give indication of where teams are sitting as of today. Since most conference games have yet to be played, we expect the predicted power house teams to climb to the top of these rankings (Maryland, Kentucky, Duke); provided they win almost all their games for the remainder of this season.

NCAA Rankings on December 28th, 2016:

We now present our top-to-bottom rankings based on wins, game locations, and disparity of points.