NCAA 2026 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2026 Men's and Women's NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.

Please contact me with any bugs you find and I'll try to fix them (i.e., testing in production).

Image source: david.dames, CC license

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NCAA 2025 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2025 Men's and Women's NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.

Please contact me with any bugs you find and I'll try to fix them (i.e., testing in production).

Image source: david.dames, CC license

NCAA 2024 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2024 Men's and Women's NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.

Please contact me with any bugs you find and I'll try to fix them (i.e., testing in production).

Image source: david.dames, CC license

NCAA 2023 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2023 Men's and Women's NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.

No enhancements this year. But, some fans of the files have started doing their own tinkering, so maybe I'll be able to integrate their efforts into a future year's files.

Please contact me with any bugs you find and I'll try to fix them (i.e., testing in production).

Image source: david.dames, CC license

NCAA 2022 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2022 Men's and Women's NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.

No enhancements this year. But, some fans of the files have started doing their own tinkering, so maybe I'll be able to integrate their efforts into a future year's files. Too bad GitHub doesn't work for Excel files or the collaborative development process would be a lot easier.

Please contact me with any bugs you find and I'll try to fix them (i.e., testing in production).

Image source: david.dames, CC license

NCAA 2021 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2021 Men's NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. The women's bracket will be available after the selection show for the women's tournament.

Only enhancement is cleaning up the Leaderboard HTML file a little bit. I realized that I wrote that code while CSS 3 was still in draft form, so I gave it a slight readability update this year. It's still not good, but it's ever-so-slightly better.

Please contact me with any bugs you find and I'll try to fix them (i.e., testing in production).

Image source: david.dames, CC license

NCAA 2019 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2019 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.

For pool managers, will you please post a comment here answering these questions? It would help with my future development.
1) What is the oldest version of Excel used by any of your participants? More importantly, does anyone use a version of Excel older than 2007?
2) Does anyone still use the v7 pool manager and brackets?

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

NCAA 2018 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2018 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. Only one change from last year -- participants no longer need to get the 'play-in' game correct. They just choose that team combo to advance (e.g., ASU/Syracuse) and will get the points if ASU or Syracuse knocks off TCU.

Favor: Please take this 5-10 minute survey on rivalry in men's DI basketball, and ask others (e.g., people in your pool) to do so as well. My day job is a sport management professor and my research area is in sport rivalry, so gathering more opinions would be valuable; you can see more about the research at knowrivalry.com.

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

NCAA 2017 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2017 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. No new functionality from last year, but at least the new teams are loaded. I promise - once my kids are older and I have tenure [got the tenure letter last week! So that bodes well for future improvements], I'll make the long-awaited improvements. In the meantime, enjoy March Madness!

Favor: Please take this 5-10 minute survey on rivalry in men's DI basketball, and ask others (e.g., people in your pool) to do so as well. My day job is a sport management professor and my research area is in sport rivalry, so gathering more opinions would be valuable; you can see more about the research at knowrivalry.com.

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

NCAA 2016 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2016 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. Only a little bit of new functionality from last year (Final Four teams visible on leaderboard), but at least the new teams are loaded. I promise - once my kids are older and I have tenure, I'll make the long-awaited improvements. In the meantime, enjoy March Madness!

Favor: Please take this 5-10 minute survey on rivalry in men's DI basketball, and ask others (e.g., people in your pool) to do so as well. My day job is a sport management professor and my research area is in sport rivalry, so gathering more opinions would be valuable; you can see more about the research at knowrivalry.com.

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

NCAA 2015 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2015 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. No new functionality changes from last year, but at least the new teams are loaded. I promise - once my kids are old enough for school and I have tenure, I'll make the long-awaited improvements. In the meantime, enjoy March Madness!

Favor: Please take this 5-10 minute survey on rivalry in men's DI basketball, and ask others (e.g., people in your pool) to do so as well. My day job is a sport management professor and my research area is in sport rivalry, so gathering more opinions would be valuable; you can see more about the research at knowrivalry.com.

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

NCAA 2014 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2014 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. The pool manager file includes the minimal enhancements that were introduced late last year, but for the most part this is the same file. Sorry there weren't more improvements, but at least the new teams are loaded. Enjoy March Madness!

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

New NCAA Basketball Pool Manager file

Thanks to everyone who is using the Excel bracket Pool Manager file. I hope you're enjoying the tournament so far (and you didn't have Georgetown or Gonzaga going too far).

I made some updates to the Pool Manager file that put back in some of the functionality that had been lost when the field expanded to 68 teams. Specifically, I added columns to the leaderboard to show Max Points, and who each participant had in the Final Four, Championship Game, and as the National Champion. As teams lose in the tourney, those team names will automatically be crossed out and the max points will update accordingly.

If you'd like to use the latest version, you can download it from the brackets page, or just click here to download.

Once you download this version (9-0-0), you'll need to re-import your participants' brackets and again update the MasterBracket tab. There has been limited testing on this version, so please let me know if you come across any errors.

I hope you continue to get good use out of the brackets, and thanks for all the feedback and suggestions for improvements.

Note: if you are using the old version (v7), your brackets won't import. This only works for the new version. I'm planning on retiring v7 once I get all the functionality migrated to the new version.

NCAA 2013 Women's basketball tournament bracket

The Excel brackets for the 2013 NCAA Women's Tournament are now available on the brackets page. Thanks to user Steve, who populated the teams.

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

NCAA 2013 Excel bracket and pool manager files

The 2013 NCAA Tournament Bracket and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page. No new enhancements over last year, but at least the new teams are loaded. Enjoy March Madness!

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

I for one welcome our new playoff overlords

The highest level of college football is finally getting a playoff. This is something for which I have advocated, including co-developing the Enhanced Bowl Season to incorporate a 12-team playoff within the existing constraints of the power structure. The conference commissioners did better by ceding a little power/control for the long-term good of the sport (and ultimately themselves). I still have issues with a 4-team system, but many of the flaws I noted can be reduced by breaking with the status quo.

I've disagreed with some actions of Jim "the bulldog" Delany and Mike Slive over the years, but there is no denying the deftness with which they've navigated many competing interests. They're smart men and have done an excellent job representing their conferences' interests. By moving to a playoff, they continue to do so - Delany estimates that this will bring 3-4 times the current revenue, an estimate that may be conservative. Further, this will make the regular season even better by keeping more teams in the hunt for a national championship longer into the season. More importantly, it may help stem the tide of cupcake scheduling for fear of getting a loss.

It looks like there will be a selection committee to choose the four tournament teams. There are many problems with that, but a positive will be removing the influence of the polls. They will still exist, but they will go back to being interesting fodder for debate. The selection committee will surely be influenced by them, but will process them through mental filters.

To be clear, this change is the result of pressure from the outside:

• Pollspeak.com shed light on the inherent flaws of human voting and advocating for transparency. The world is better when those with power provide transparency (c.f., Arab Spring, US government, Google).


• Playoff PAC consolidated the opposition and put forth a focused counter case.


• The media played a huge role with blogs (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BCS) and books (Death to the BCS)


• Larry Scott brought cultural change and the willingness to take on sacred cows.


• Federal & state governments got involved


• And don't discount the bowls who sewed the seeds of their destruction through avarice and corruption.

The new playoff won't be perfect. It may not even be good. Fans, pundits, and critics will still rightfully howl. Biases will still permeate the selection committee and power interests will still work to be maintained. But it will be better. This is progress toward fairness on the field. Decades of lowering my expectations make me happy about that. But watch this space sometime after 2014 for more complaints.

NCAA 2012 Pool Manager

The 2012 NCAA Brackets and Pool Manager files are now available on the brackets page.  This year pool managers have the option to include scoring for the "First Four" matchups.

Image courtesy of david.dames under a Creative Commons license

Notre Dame - National champions!

Congratulations to the men and women of the Notre Dame fencing team. The Irish took first place at NCAAs, holding a consistent lead throughout the tournament and beating Penn State by 7 bouts. This is head coach Janusz Bednarski's third championship, and Notre Dame's second national championship this year (women's soccer).

Basketball isn't the only NCAA championship

As I'm sure you know, the NCAA championships in fencing began yesterday and continue through Sunday. The format is a round robin, so each athlete within a weapon (epee, sabre, and foil are the three weapons) will fence against every other athlete in that weapon, within his or her gender. That is, the men only fence against men, and women against women. The men's competition takes place on Thu and Fri, and the women compete Sat and Sun; every year it flips, so in 2012 the women will fence first.

However, the format of determining the national champion in fencing is unique in that the men's and women's scores are combined. By aggregating the scores, it means that schools must have a strong men's and women's team in order to win.

This seems like great system to encourage equity between male and female student-athletes. Concerns about Title IX can be partially alleviated when performance by both sexes is required to achieve success. The women are just as important as the men in terms of winning a national championship. On the other hand, a school like Northwestern will never win a title: it has a very strong women's team, but its men's program is only club level and thus does not compete at NCAAs.

Is this a good system? Is it fair to Northwestern? Are there any other NCAA sports that operate in this fashion?

By the way, to follow scores live, go to http://www.prisedefer.com/NCAA. Halfway through the competition, the Notre Dame men have a 6 bout lead over Penn State, as well as an individual champion (Ariel DeSmet in foil). It should be an exciting two-day finish in Columbus.

Excel basketball brackets for 2011

The new March Madness Excel bracket and pool manager file are available for download! Click on the "Brackets" tab above, or go to http://whistleblows.com/brackets/

New this year: In addition to supporting the expanded NCAA field of 68 teams (it actually supports 128), the Excel bracket file includes the option of showing the date, time, and television channel for the round of 64 games. The dates are available for other rounds, but the TV broadcasts will not be announced until the tournament is underway.

The pool manager file is missing some of the features of past years. Those features will be back, but not until the 2012 edition. Sorry, just ran out of time.

I hope you all enjoy the brackets! Please share your thoughts, and any bugs you find or enhancements you'd like to see, on the Brackets page.

Update: If you want all the functionality from last year's bracket and don't mind not being able to pick the First Four games, you can download last year's pool manager file and bracket (already with 2011 teams). They must be used with each other (i.e., you cannot use this year's bracket with last year's pool manager file).