Champ Week is here! Just a handful of regular season college basketball games are left to be played, but otherwise we're fully into the postseason. Several conferences already have their conference tournaments nearing their conclusions, and all others will start this week as we get closer to March Madness.
Each year when we reach Champ Week, we hear lots of talk about "bid-stealers" for the NCAA Tournament. But what is a bid-stealer?
What is a bid-stealer in college basketball?
A bid-stealer is a team that wins its conference tournament, securing an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, that would not have otherwise been selected for the NCAA Tournament as an at-large. But the key is that team has to play in a league that has at least one at-large worthy team.
All 31 D1 men's basketball conferences are guaranteed one bid to the NCAA Tournament, which are awarded to the winners of the conference tournaments. For most of these leagues, they only see their one automatic-bid reach the postseason.
But there are 37 at-large bids that must be granted to fill out the 68-team bracket, and the better conferences with more high-level programs will see several teams enter the tournament as at-larges. Throughout the season teams work to put together the best NCAA Tournament resume possible, and by the time we reach conference tournaments, we have a pretty good idea of which teams did enough to guarantee themselves a trip to the Big Dance as at-larges.
Typically, the at-large worthy teams end up winning the conference tournaments by the simple fact that they're usually the better teams. The more at-large worthy teams that win their conference tournaments and secure auto bids, the more at-large bids there are freed up. But college basketball is an unpredictable sport. Anyone can win on any given day, teams that had previously been struggling can get hot, and the nature of conference tournaments, which require teams to play several days in a row, can lead to upsets.
So occasionally, we see a team with no shot at an at-large bid make a run to win their conference tournament and earn the automatic bid. And when this happens, there's one less at-large bid to go around, which is why we refer to the conference tournament winner as a bid-stealer.
Most college basketball fans tend to associate bid-stealers with mid-major leagues. Most mid-major leagues usually see just one-bid (their auto bid) reach the tournament, but occasionally they'll have a team good enough to get in the at-large discussion. If that team doesn't win its conference tournament, what would have been a one-team league just became a two-bid league.
Last year's Atlantic 10 Conference season is a great example of this. Dayton was the lone team out of the A-10 that had a resume strong enough to reach the NCAA Tournament, but the Flyers lost in the A-10 Tournament to Duquesne, who would go on to win the A-10 Tournament and reach March Madness, stealing a bid in the process.
There's simple math to it. The fewer at-large worthy teams a conference has (assuming they have at least one), the higher probability there is that someone from that league that isn't at-large worthy wins the conference tournament.
But it can happen in power conference leagues with multiple at-large teams too. Last year's NC State team that made an improbable run all the way to the Final Four was actually a bid-stealer. The Wolfpack would not have made the NCAA Tournament had they not won the ACC Tournament. They just made the most of their opportunity.
The existence of bid-stealers is specifically important to teams on the NCAA Tournament bubble. Those are the teams whose at-large resumes are questionable. If they're going to make March Madness, it will be as the last at-large bids granted. But if there are bid-stealers, there may suddenly not be any space left for them in the field.
Will there be any bid-stealers for 2025? That's TBD, but we could see one as soon as Sunday. The Drake Bulldogs are playing in the Missouri Valley Tournament final against Bradley, and Drake, despite playing in a traditional one-bid league, has a strong case to reach the NCAA Tournament as an at-large. In fact, they should almost certainly be in the Big Dance regardless.
If Drake loses to Bradley, who beat them earlier this season, Bradley could be our first bid-stealer of 2025. So if you're a fan of a bubble team, you need to be cheering hard for the Bulldogs on Sunday.