ARCHIVE: Original Silver Bulletin 2025 March Madness Predictions
Silver Bulletin odds for the men's NCAA tournament.
This is simply an archive of our men’s NCAA tournament predictions as of the late afternoon on March 18, which we’re posting now that the tournament — well, First Four games, which probably won’t affect your office pool — are underway. It’s posted solely for accountability purposes so that you can check our work later, as the main tournament page will update to reflect results so far. All data and text are preserved “as is” as of ~3:30 pm on 3/18/25. You’ll probably want to click over to the main tournament page unless you specifically want to assess the original forecasts. Comments are off on this post, but we’re always happy to welcome new subscribers.
We’ve been hard at work on our college basketball forecasts this year. We’ve recalibrated them based on analyzing more than 250,000 historical college basketball games. We now have our own fully-fledged rating system — SBCB — though our ratings are combined with other systems for purposes of our tournament forecasts. And there are some new wrinkles this year, too, like a better formula to account for injuries1 — though if you’re reading this from Durham, North Carolina, you’ll be glad to know that it looks like Cooper Flagg will be OK.
Still, March Madness projections are an annual tradition in these parts. We’ve run tourney forecasts through literally every iteration of Silver Bulletin/FiveThirtyEight dating back to 2011. Some of the code2 in the model goes back even earlier than that from when I was trying to win my friend’s unnecessarily complicated office pool as a junior associate at KPMG back in 2002 or 2003. The tournament was also key to our launch strategy at the Disney-fied version of FiveThirtyEight in 2014. And if I’m being honest, it was an inflection point for this newsletter. I was on the fence about running the 2024 version, but I figured it was worth a few hours of work on an idle Sunday. Instead, it took until 3 in the morning. But our paid subscription count basically tripled overnight to the point where I thought it was some sort of glitch. That was all the proof of concept we needed to reboot the election forecast and other things.
How this works
We’ll update these numbers once per day (usually in the morning) after tournament games are played. If you’re reading this by email, you’ll want to use the web version because we can’t magically change the text in your inbox.
These ratings give half the weight to our Bayesian SBCB ratings3 and half to a composite of other systems, namely:
The Massey ratings
And the NCAA tournament committee’s S-Curve rankings, i.e. how it seeds all tournament teams from 1 through 68.
They also account for injuries, travel distance, and — once the tournament is underway — how teams have performed so far in the tourney relative to the model’s expectations. (Getting “hot” in the tourney is a thing.) For more detail about how all of this works behind the scenes, see here.
It’s a wide-open tournament this year, but let’s cut to the chase: who’s the most likely winner? I’m not excited about this, because like 98 percent of well-adjusted college basketball fans, I’m not Crazy for Cameron. But the answer is … Duke, by a hair.
You can see that, for now, there’s strong alignment between who we think the best teams are and who has the best odds. (Though we disagree with the selection committee, who has Auburn as the #1 overall seed.) But this isn’t always the case. There can be discrepancies introduced based on how easy or difficult each team’s draw is, injuries, and the geographic location of each game — plus who’s managed to survive in the tournament so far.
What you’ll find on the rest of this page — and throughout the tourney
Projected odds for all rounds in all four regions, along with brief commentary; the South is free for all readers, while the other regions are a benefit for paying subscribers.
Forecasted win probabilities and margins of victory — which conveniently double as point spreads — for forthcoming games.
A spreadsheet version of these forecasts with additional precision.
Additional tables and spreadsheets comparing all rating systems we use on a common scale, plus current injury adjustments.
As I’ve said, these forecasts will be updated once daily — but as a heads-up, we’ll likely pare down on the commentary once the tournament is underway just because we figure speed and the numbers are at a premium relative to me pontificating. Once the action gets started, I’ll create an archived version of this page so you can see just how right or wrong the original forecasts were, even if our bracket gets busted.
I’ll probably send an update or two out over the email list, but we won’t spam you; approximately 27 percent of Silver Bulletin subscribers are degenerate gamblers extremely interested in the tournament while others are not interested at all. For notifications of updates, please follow me on Twitter. Or perhaps better, Substack Notes. It won’t be an overnight transition — but I’m planning to gradually do more of my “microblogging” on Notes given the problems with the alternatives.
Also, we know from past experience that many people subscribe just for the tournament forecasts and then don’t stick around so long. We won’t take offense, and we appreciate your business either way. But we do think the annual subscription price is the better deal, and we plan to gradually reintroduce various sports and politics models over the course of the next year.
The South
Can we be honest? It’s not the strongest region. Our SBCB ratings and most other computer systems actually regard Auburn as the weakest #1 seed, not the best. The #3 seed in the South is Iowa State, another team that SBCB regards as weaker than the consensus. Plus, there are two play-in games, one involving the worst team in the bracket, St. Francis. The Red Flash have a 1 in 375,396,779 chance of winning the Big Dance, so never say never, I guess.
That could open the door to my hometown Michigan State Spartans, although Sparty just lost in the Big Ten semifinals. For a deeper sleeper, consider Louisville, whom we have as the 15th-best team — in other words, they should have been a #4 seed, not an 8. UC San Diego — not to be confused with plain old San Diego, or San Diego State — also has a relatively high chance of pulling off a classic 12-vs-5 upset versus Michigan.
The West
Now, this one’s a bit more action packed.