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In a recent NCAA Tournament bracketology prediction, Jeff Capel’s Pitt basketball team was predicted to be one of the last four teams to make the field.
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi included Pitt among the “Last Four In” category in his Monday update. He has four ACC teams on the bubble, including Pitt. He has North Carolina, SMU, and Wake Forest missing the field in the “Next Four Out” category.
In addition, The Field of 68 released its updated NCAA Tournament projection on Monday, including the Panthers in the field as a No. 11 seed in the play-in game against Georgia. The winner of that game in the projected bracket would take on No. 6 seed Oregon.
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The Field of 68 projects just four ACC teams to make the field: Duke (1 seed), Louisville (7 seed), and Clemson (8 seed). The company has two ACC teams in the “First Four Out” category: Wake Forest and SMU.
Pitt non-conference opponents Mississippi State (7 seed), West Virginia (9 seed), and Ohio State (11 seed) are also in the projected field.
Pitt hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since the 2022-23 season, in which it went all the way from the First Four to the Round of 32.
This offseason, the NCAA added two new metrics to consideration for the NCAA Tournament field.
The two metrics — Bart Torvik’s “T-Rank” and Wins Above Bubble — will be considered when the committee is weighing prospective NCAA Tournament teams.
“The committee has always valued different data points and metrics to assist with its evaluation process, and these two metrics have increasingly been referenced by members in recent years,” NCAA Senior VP of Basketball Dan Gavitt said in a press release. “Adding them to the team sheet ensures that all 12 members easily have access to this data. The Torvik rankings, along with BPI and KenPom, give the committee three predictive ratings, while the WAB, Strength of Record and KPI give them three results-based metrics, all of which, in addition to the NET, will be beneficial to the team evaluation process.”
The NCAA announced this addition to the selection committee’s team sheet at its summer meetings. It also announced that the 2026 Division II and III men’s basketball championships and the NIT semifinals and finals will take place in Indianapolis the same weekend as the Division I Final Four. Here is more information on the new metrics in consideration.
“The committee has always valued different data points and metrics to assist with its evaluation process, and these two metrics have increasingly been referenced by members in recent years,” Gavitt added. “Adding them to the team sheet ensures that all 12 members easily have access to this data. The Torvik rankings, along with BPI and KenPom, give the committee three predictive ratings, while the WAB, Strength of Record and KPI give them three results-based metrics, all of which, in addition to the NET, will be beneficial to the team evaluation process.”
For reference, Pitt’s 2022-23 team rated significantly lower than the average NCAA Tournament team in T-Rank, coming in at No. 72 in the country. However, the 2023-24 team — the one that did not make the tournament — finished the season at No. 30 overall. Saint John’s (No. 16), Pitt (No. 30), Villanova (No. 31), Wake Forest (No. 35), Seton Hall (No. 38), and Utah (No. 40) were the highest-ranked Torvik teams that did not earn a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
“The core of T-Rank is calculating offensive and defensive efficiency: points scored and points allowed per possession (“PPP” = points per possession, often rendered as points per 100 possessions),” Torvik said in a blog post explaining the stat. “Although coaches like Dean Smith and Bo Ryan have long relied on PPP, it really hit the big time when Ken Pomeroy popularized it about a decade ago.”
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