How to play Bracket Crew

Bracket Crew is a college basketball bracket challenge for friend groups. Start a crew, share the six-letter code, and everyone fills a bracket for the big dance in March. Until the field is announced you can practice on 40 years of real tournaments, play the daily pick'em and keep a quiz streak.

Start or join a crew

Tap Crews → Start a crew, name it (the office, the family, the group chat) and share the code. Friends tap Join with code. No accounts, no passwords: everybody just picks a name. A crew can have up to 500 members and you can be in as many crews as you like.

Fill your bracket

The field of 68 teams is announced on Sunday, 14 March 2027. Fill all 63 games before the first tip-off of the first round (Thursday, 18 March). Use Quick mode to pick game by game with big cards, or the sheet to see a whole region. The four play-in slots show as a pair – your pick goes to whoever wins that slot. The last pick is your champion plus a tiebreaker: the total points of the title game.

Scoring

Classic scoring gives 10 points per right pick in the first round, then 20, 40, 80, 160 and 320 for the title game – every round is worth 320 in total. Crew owners can switch to Simple (1-2-4-8-16-32) or, with the Season Pass, set their own points and an upset bonus: the seed difference when the lower seed wins, the winner's seed on every right pick, or round points times the winner's seed.

Live results

Results and live scores update by themselves every few minutes during the tournament. Each bracket shows its score and the maximum it can still reach; brackets of your crew become visible at tip-off.

Practice brackets

Every tournament since 1985 (men) and 1994 (women) is in the archive. Fill one blind, then Submit & reveal to see how you would have done. Each week one year is the Throwback for every crew.

Pick'em and Upset or Not

From November to March the app picks the five best games of each day. Pick winners before tip-off and climb your crew's table. The daily Upset or Not? quiz shows five real games from past tournaments – did the favorite survive?

Bracketology and early calls

Our own power ratings (an Elo rating of every game this season) project the field of 68 every day. Make an early call – champion and last four – months ahead: calls made in November score triple, December ×2.5, January ×2, February ×1.5.

Win odds, feed and second chance

After tip-off every crew shows each bracket's chance to win, from thousands of simulations of the rest of the tournament, plus the games to root for. The crew feed shows new brackets, busted champions, reactions and preset trash talk. Busted early? The second-chance bracket starts again from the last 16.

Is it free?

Yes, with no ads. Crews, one bracket per tournament, pick'em, the quiz, bracketology and the last ten years of practice brackets are free. The one-time Season Pass adds up to 10 brackets, upset and win odds, smart autofill, the full archive and poster styles; the Crew Pass lets an organiser give the whole crew win odds, custom scoring and 3 brackets each. There is no betting, no entry fee and no prize money.

Get Bracket Crew on Google Play