The good news on Selection Monday 2025 is that when it comes to building a tournament field the NCAA men’s basketball committee is much sounder in its workings than it was previously. The process has become so rational and predictable that we are all bracketologists now. You or I or someone who hasn’t seen a single game can identify 36 of 37 at-large teams in advance with wins above bubble.

As one who in the past devoted thousands of words to what I found to be the unsound workings of previous committees, I don’t wish to minimize this good news. In fact within the narrow confines of a foundational premise to the effect that “the committee still exists in 2025,” I’m here to applaud.

WAB is the way. It tells us how well you did at winning the games you played. At one stroke it nullifies entirely that malicious contagion of evaluative mayhem known as quadrants. (The NCAA should put quadrants out of their misery this morning with an official “never mind, our bad” statement.) If we are to have a committee, that group should absolutely be doing what this group just did.

One of the many joys of the NCAA tournament is that it can be savored as two distinct events. There is of course the desire to see the strongest teams with the best records settle this question head-to-head. This dynamic emerges over the second weekend and can on occasion shine forth to brilliant effect at the Final Four.

The first weekend’s radically different. The last five brackets in particular have shown how fully the round of 64 embraces the term March Madness.

Over that time we’ve seen two No. 1 seeds fall in the round of 64. We’re on a three-year streak of a No. 2 seed losing to a No. 15 each March. These are upheavals that “should” occur just one and seven percent of the time, respectively. We’ve been awash in rarity since 2018.

The round of 64 holds two qualities that are scarce if not wholly absent anywhere else in team sports as media properties. First there’s the sheer volume of the knockout round: 32 games in 36 hours, give or take. Often there are four games happening at once and every one constitutes the most important 40 minutes of the season to the teams and their entire fan bases.

The NCAA tournament is shockingly close to perfect because fairness is sacrificed so ruthlessly and deliberately at the altar of drama. Every March without fail we learn again that literally any team can lose in a single-elimination bracket that requires six or seven wins for a championship. Possibly this isn’t the fairest method for determining a national title. Well, sports aren’t fair. The tournament’s a national treasure.

Incrementally and miraculously, the NCAA tournament evolved over the years into an iconic event worthy of Naismith’s game. The defining features of the tournament are access and single elimination. Limiting access to the top 68 teams in any given rating system would effectively kill the magic. You would still have a compelling win-or-go-home bracket populated by the top teams, it just wouldn’t be March Madness.

If hoops had been around in Talleyrand’s day he would have said smoothing out the randomness by eliminating single elimination would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake. The randomness that governs which teams lose one time is the point. Then, in the compensatory fashion of any trustworthy dialectic, the teams that emerge without losing even once turn out to be not quite so random after all.

Access and single elimination are the unchanging sinews of a championship event for a changing game. This tournament is irreplaceable, no less so because the evolution of the sport itself has completely changed the content of its championship event.