Bracket Talk v1.08
I’m going to start updating this bracket twice/week (Mondays and Fridays) for the rest of the season. I’ll save the larger discussions for the Friday posts, so Mondays will just be a bracket and a few odds and ends.
The top six teams in the bracket are clear, although there’s plenty of room of debate about which team should get that last 1-seed. Florida has the inside track, but if Houston can win the double (regular season and conference tournament titles), it will be hard for the committee to make them a 2-seed.
The Big 10 is a mess right now, but that doesn’t mean its teams are bad. It’s undoubtedly the second best conference in the country. Purdue had been one of the teams I felt best about as a 2-seed, but a four game losing skid has tanked them down to a four-seed alongside metrics darling Maryland. Michigan State, Michigan, and Wisconsin are at the top of the conference standings, and while UCLA had hit its stride recently, a weird home loss to Minnesota really makes it hard to guess what’s next for the Bruins. Regardless, America’s biggest conference has six teams between the 2 and 5 seed line in my latest bracket.
While this may be as strong of a 1-seed line as we’ve seen in a long time, the 8/9 line looks like it will have some elite talent as well. Gonzaga, a top 10-12 team in almost every quality metric, can’t build any sort of resume and will likely end up there. Illinois has struggled massively of late, but they were a solid 2/3 seed as recently as January. Creighton may have a first team all-american at center in Ryan Kalkbrenner, and Memphis has the best resume of any mid-major not named St. Mary’s. Each of these teams has obvious warts, but I would be careful about penciling in all four 1-seeds for the second weekend.
As we’ve talked about before, what the committee does with the SEC teams around the bubble will be fascinating. The bubble is extremely weak, and includes four SEC teams (Vanderbilt, Texas, Oklahoma, UGA). Will the committee reward the dominance of the SEC in non-conference play and let these teams in despite poor conference records? I think anyone who gets to 7+ SEC wins will be in, but a 6-12 record may not be a death sentence.
I’ve been riding the George Mason (and KD Johnson) bid-stealing hype train for a few weeks, but for this week I’ve taken them out of the field and added Boise State as a bid-stealer in the Mountain West. They’re on the wrong side of the bubble for an at-large, but they’ve won six of their last seven, and have a pretty easy path to close out the regular season with some momentum. The Broncos have gotten bounced in their first game of the NCAAT each of the last three years, so it won’t be hard for longtime Boise coach Leon Rice to light a fire under his team.
