With the men’s NCAA Tournament first-round games tipping off Thursday at 12:15 p.m. ET, it’s almost time for one of the best days on the sports calendar. It’s also time to make some predictions — specifically projecting the scores for every single first-round matchup.
My projections here should help you with making bets on the spread and total for all the men’s first-round games. If you’re not betting on the games, you can still use this info for making bracket picks or to see which of your teams I hate (kidding).
Before getting into the numbers, here’s a quick explainer on what you’re looking at in the table. I created a college basketball model to project the outcomes of games. I take several metrics into account and adjust them for the opponent, and that creates a projection for each team on how likely they are to win a game against an average opponent. From there, I set up the bracket and simulate the tournament one million times to get my projected scores for each first-round game.
2024 men’s NCAA Tournament first-round projections
In the table below, “xMOV” is the expected margin of victory. xTotal is the expected number of points between the two teams.
Note: As of first publishing on Wednesday, two First Four games are yet to be decided, so those two first-round matchups are TBD. We will update the table as soon as those games are final. There are placeholders there in the meantime.
(Photo of Rob Dillingham: Michael Hickey / Getty Images)
