Filling out your bracket is a national tradition. Just as much as watching your bracket get busted in round one is.
There is so much uncertainty when it comes to the NCAA Tournament, which is why March is one of the best sports months of the year. Our days are filled with basketball for 12 hours a day.
One company, Wolverines Studios, took it a step further than just a bracket. They developed a simulation to determine just who would be the 2023 national champions. There were some surprises in this simulation, very similar to what we have seen over the years with Cinderella runs to the Elite Eight.
For this simulation we took our game, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2023, and used a community-created mod to place the real schools into a bracket using our built in game function called Tournament Maker. This feature allows you to create a custom 64-team tournament within the game and simulate or play out the games so we entered the teams into their proper bracket spots and simulated the results of the tournament.
Our simulation shows two of the top seeds heading into the finals and meeting in the championship game with Houston coming out on top over Alabama. The West top seed Kansas made a valiant run to be knocked out in the West regional finals by Gonzaga while Tennessee played spoiler for Purdue before being knocked out themselves in the East regional finals by Marquette. In our simulation, only one of the four 12 seeds advanced with Drake upsetting Miami and possibly the most surprising result was Utah State making a strong run from the 10th seed all the way to the South regional finals. – Gary Gorski, President of Wolverine Studios
Check out how each region and the Final Four break down: