How to play a college
basketball simulator.

Cut the Nets is a college basketball tournament simulator: choose a historical field, change a roster and coach a different ending. You can play free in your browser or download the iPhone and iPad app. This guide explains a first run and the player-by-player engine now available in the browser version.

On this page

Start your first tournament

1. Choose a season in the browser. On your first visit, tap Pick my first team, then Pick any team, any year. On later visits, use Pick any team, any year on Home. Choose a season, then tap Run this season to select your team. You can also choose a suggested first team for a quicker start. There are 82 playable seasons from 1944 through 2026, excluding 2020. Early tournaments can start at a later reconstructed round.
2. Choose your team and roster. Claim a team in that field, or create a program. Swap players before locking in. The browser game and iPhone/iPad version 1.1.0 offer free swaps in Rewrite mode or seed-based limits in Budget Challenge. Your roster locks at tip-off.
3. Make your calls. Set your gameplan, then watch a game live or simulate it. Timeouts and halftime let you change the plan. In the browser’s latest engine, style and tempo are separate choices.
4. Read the result. Check the box score and compare your run with the historical tournament results. A loss is a reason to try another roster or plan; a title earns the net-cutting finish.

Platform check: 23 September 2026. The engine, style and tempo features below are available in the browser game and iPhone/iPad version 1.1.0. Update older app versions before following this guide.

A possession, from the top

Every trip down the floor is resolved the same way. The engine looks at who is on the court for both teams, decides how long the possession takes, decides whether it ends in a turnover, and if it doesn't, picks who takes the shot and whether it goes in. Fouls, rebounds and substitutions fall out of that, not out of a separate roll.

That matters because it means the things you would expect to interact actually do. A lineup with no rim protection gives up shots at the rim. A team that presses forces more turnovers and fouls more and tires faster, because those are the same decision. A star who is having a bad shooting night keeps taking the shots if you told the team to feed him, and the box score at the end shows you exactly what that cost.

Where the ratings come from

The player pool is over 20,000 real players, and a player is not one rating — they are a rating per season. The 1985 version of somebody and the 1988 version are different entries with different numbers, because they were different players.

Those numbers are built from the public record: recorded box-score production for that season, the honours the player actually received that year, and where they were drafted if they were. Each player-season also carries a label saying which of those the rating leaned on — measured from that season's statistics, inferred from honours, or estimated from the team's season when the individual record is thin. It is an honest way of saying that a 2015 guard's numbers rest on firmer ground than a 1947 forward's.

Teams carry cited facts too: the head coach, conference, record, final national ranking, seed and leading scorer for that season, each with a source behind it.

The actual decision you get to make

Before tip-off you choose two things, and you can change either one at a timeout or at halftime.

A style — eight cards, covering what you want to do with the ball and what you want to do about theirs. Play balanced. Let it fly and take threes. Pound it inside and live at the rim. Feed the star. Lock down. Switch everything. Press. Protect the ball.

A tempo — normal, push the pace, or slow it down. Tempo affects how many possessions the game has, changing the opportunities for both teams to score.

These are not cosmetic. Each style shifts real parameters: how many of your shots become threes, how many become rim attempts, your turnover rate, your opponent's make probability, how quickly your players tire. And crucially, a style is worth what your lineup can do with it. Telling a team of non-shooters to let it fly gains you very little. The same call with three genuine shooters on the floor is a different game.

How tempo changes a game

More possessions give a stronger team more opportunities to make its advantage count. Fewer possessions can leave more room for a few unusual plays to decide the outcome. That is a useful principle, not a guaranteed tactic: lineup fit, fatigue, shooting and the opponent still matter.

Try one change at a time. Compare the score, the shots and the turnovers before deciding what helped.

Why a 16 seed sometimes wins

Because a single game is a small sample, and basketball has a lot of noise in it. Across 41 tournaments of the 64-team era, 16 seeds have gone 2–162 against 1 seeds — about 1.2%. That is close to zero and is not zero, and any simulation that rounds it to zero has stopped being a simulation.

The engine never decides in advance that an upset is due. It plays the possessions; a shooting night runs hot or cold, foul trouble arrives or it doesn't, and sometimes the numbers land somewhere the seed line did not expect. When they do, there is a box score explaining it. The full historical picture is on what a seed line is actually worth.

The same bracket, twice

Every tournament is stamped with a seed, and the simulation is deterministic from it: within the same engine version, the same bracket, roster and calls reproduce the same games. That is what makes a shared bracket link work — a friend opening a supported link in the same engine version gets the same field and random seed, so the only difference between your run and theirs is what the two of you decided to do.

It is also why changing nothing and replaying gives you the same result, while changing one substitution can change everything downstream. The randomness is fixed; your decisions are not.

What this is not

It is not a prediction tool. It does not know anything about games that have not been played, it has no opinion about this year's field, and it is not a betting aid. Everything it produces is a simulated result built from historical statistics, and no outcome in it represents what any real person or team would actually do.

It is a machine for replaying arguments. That is the whole design.