The NCAA Men’s Basketball Champion, if Brains Beat Brawn

The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I men’s basketball tournament gets underway later this week, and how the world has changed, with players unionizing, some earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as compensation for use of their likenesses, and Americans able to legally gamble their hard-earned salaries on college games.

One thing has remained constant since 2006, though: Inside Higher Ed’s annual Academic Performance Tournament. Unlike traditional NCAA brackets, ours determines the winners of each game by comparing the academic performance of teams, as measured by the NCAA’s own flawed metrics for judging academic success.

We first match the teams based on the academic progress rate, the NCAA’s multiyear measure of a team’s academic performance. Among other things, the APR excludes athletes who leave in good academic standing, so powerhouse programs where players tend to go pro early can still fare well on the measure. The NCAA did not publish APR data during the pandemic, but this year’s bracket uses the first new data the NCAA has published since then, covering the 2021–22 academic year.

When two teams matched up for a game in the bracket tie going head-to-head on the APR, we turn to the NCAA’s graduation success rate for 2022–23, which measures the proportion of athletes who graduated within six years of entering the institution. The graduation success rate also excludes athletes who leave the institution in good academic standing and credits programs for players who transfer in and go on to graduate from the institution. As a result, the rates on average are significantly higher than the federal graduation rate, the formula the federal government uses to track graduation rates for all students.

If the two matched-up teams have identical scores on both the APR and the graduation success rate, we use the basketball team’s federal graduation rate to break that tie. That did not happen in this year’s IHE bracket.

Below is Inside Higher Ed’s 2024 Academic Performance Tournament bracket. The winner?

Roll Tide.