The NCAA selects 81 teams for the Division I Men's Golf Championship (72 for women's), distributed across six regional sites. The committee uses a serpentine (S-curve) distribution to balance competitive strength: the top 6 seeds go to regionals 1 through 6, seeds 7–12 are assigned in reverse order (6 through 1), seeds 13–18 go forward again, and so on. This ensures no single regional is stacked with all the top-ranked teams.

Our tool offers two modes. The Strict S-Curve is the pure mathematical serpentine — what a computer would output with no human judgment applied. The Committee Prediction replicates how the NCAA selection committee actually operates, with three adjustments explained below.

The committee assigns the top 6 seeds to whichever regional site is closest to them geographically, rather than following the strict serpentine order. This is why a team like Texas typically lands at the Bryan Regional, not wherever the math says.

If a host school is in the field, they play at their home regional. The team that would have been placed there swaps with the host within the same seed tier.

Automatic qualifiers from smaller conferences (typically seeded around 12–13) usually get some geographic consideration. The committee avoids shipping them across the country when a closer regional is available.

To be eligible for an at-large bid, a team must finish the regular season at or above .500 against Division I opponents. Teams below .500 can still reach the field as automatic qualifiers (by winning their conference tournament), but we flag those as sub-.500 AQs because they bypass the eligibility rule. The .500 Watch section of the Bubble Breakdown shows teams ranked well enough to be in the field but excluded by this rule.

The worst-ranked at-large team that still made the field. Every team ranked better than the Magic Number is effectively safe. Every team ranked close to it is on the bubble — a few tournament results away from being in or out.

In the regional view, you will see a red dashed line between the 5th and 6th team in each regional. The top 5 teams from each regional advance to the NCAA Championship. The matchups around that cutoff are the most interesting — those are the bubble teams where head-to-head records, course familiarity, and momentum matter most.

A team's head-to-head record against every other team in the same field across all 2025–26 shared events. For example, if team A played team B at two tournaments this year and beat them both times, that counts as 2-0 toward A's H2H-in-field record for any field that contains B. Shown as W-L or W-L-T when ties exist.

Average stroke differential per meeting versus every other team in the field. A negative value is good — it means the team has, on average, beaten the rest of the field by that many strokes per meeting. A positive value means the team has been losing to the field by that many strokes on average.