Picking the right Cinderella is only half the battle when building your March Madness bracket. The real way brackets get busted is trusting the wrong favorites: teams that look safe on paper but carry serious red flags.
Several highly seeded teams in this year's tournament fall squarely into that category. Let's break down the five riskiest teams to choose to advance in your bracket and why you should be very careful about how far you send them into March Madness.
Purdue Boilermakers
It may seem hard to believe, but the No. 1 team in the country entering the season was Purdue, which retained the nucleus of a team that went to the Sweet 16 one year ago before giving eventual runner-up Houston everything they could handle. The Boilermakers started 17-1 through mid-January and finished with a Big Ten Tournament title, but their midseason slump raises serious concerns.
From Jan. 20 through the end of the regular season, Purdue went 6-7, dropping three home games with very shaky defensive performances. A week of good play in Chicago is not enough of a sample size to believe the Boilermakers are back — plus, there's a potential road environment in St. Louis against Missouri in the Round of 32 looming. There is a very reasonable scenario where Purdue reverts back to its mid-season form and gets bounced by the Sweet 16, making anyone pushing them to the Final Four at risk of a ruined bracket.
Wisconsin Badgers
One of the most popular sleepers in this field is Wisconsin, which has four high-end wins against Big Ten powerhouses (Michigan, Michigan State, Illinois, Purdue) inside the top four seed lines. The Badgers picked up three of those wins on the road, knocking down at least 15 threes in each win, giving them the look of a giant killer in March.
This same team also lost to Indiana, USC, TCU and Oregon, which finished below .500 for the season. So it is clear that Wisconsin is prone to playing down to their competition. There is that legitimate 5-12 upset potential in the first round with their matchup against High Point, who can score as well as anyone in the country and leads the nation in steals per game.
The Badgers' high variance in performance (especially if their threes aren't falling) makes them a team to be very careful picking in your bracket. The wide range of outcomes for Wisconsin makes it likely that whatever decision you make with them in your bracket will be the wrong one.
BYU Cougars
A.J. Dybantsa is fun and is one of the best freshmen in the country, but BYU's profile didn't scream 6-seed. A 7-10 record in Quad 1 games would indicate the Cougars can hold their own against elite teams, but playing in the Big 12 provided plenty of games that offer wins in that area without truly stacking elite results, beating only two ranked teams all season: Iowa State and Texas Tech (without J.T. Toppin) at home.
The loss of guard Richie Saunders has also removed one of the Cougars' three stars, meaning there is a lot more work for Dybantsa and Rob Wright to do to advance BYU through the bracket. Drawing a First Four opponent isn’t easy — in fact, at least one usually reaches the Round of 32 every year, and an underrated Gonzaga could manhandle the Cougars. Dybantsa will draw NBA fans to push BYU forward once they see his stats, but this team isn’t built for March.
Kansas Jayhawks
Kansas is on the 4-line and has the potential top pick in the NBA Draft in Darryn Peterson. The flashy stat line that Peterson has will attract casual interest by bracket builders to send Kansas deep through March, but the Jayhawks haven't looked cohesive with Peterson all year. His lingering injury issues have made it tough for Bill Self to build chemistry with the group.
There are some high end wins on the Jayhawks' ledger, including the first team to beat Arizona, as well as victories over Houston, BYU and Iowa State, but all of those came at Allen Fieldhouse. Kansas is a different team away from the most-dangerous environment in college basketball, dropping games at West Virginia, Cincinnati (by 16) and Arizona State (by 10), and last we checked, the NCAA Tournament will not be played at the Phog.
Kentucky Wildcats
Another popular pick for casual fans, Kentucky is a blue blood that has not performed great in March of late. The Wildcats have reached the second weekend just once since the pandemic, going one-and-done twice with massive upset losses to double-digit seeds: getting Gohlke-d by 14-seed Oakland in 2024 and being the first victim of 15-seed Saint Peter's Elite Eight run in 2022.
Mark Pope's group has lost 13 games this season and doesn't have a true point guard after Jaland Lowe underwent season-ending shoulder surgery in January. Dealing with Santa Clara and potentially Big 12 heavyweight Iowa State in the Round of 32 is not a good path for the Wildcats, who are likely to flop this time around.