Bracketology 01.26.20 - Projecting the NCAA Tournament

BRACKET NOTES
- As always, teams are selected, seeded, and bracketed as if today was Selection Sunday.

- There is not a ton separating West Virginia, Tennessee and the teams in-between. With West Virginia coming in as the final 3-seed and Tennessee as the top 5-seed, that’s a tough gap if you’re a Vols supporter. In general, with less games on the schedule this season - each individual result against quality competition will cause more ripple effect on resumes than ever before. I believe it will cause a surplus of chaotic scenarios by March. Let’s beg to the heavens that we get a full Championship Week played.

- The final 5-seed choice was excruciatingly difficult for me. Oklahoma State held on to it, mainly because of their high-leverage win in Lubbock. But if the committee decided to not treat road wins as heavily this year, the Cowboys could slide considerably. If you check out our Inside The Bracket page, you’ll see an accurate visual of the “In Safely” teams. Not much is separating 20th thru 31st on the Seed List.

- Oregon is a team dealing with major Covid isssues. Both LJ Figueroa and Chris Duarte were absent for the loss against rival Oregon State. How much will the committee look at that? For today, we treat this at face value and the Ducks slipped to a 10-seed.

- Three of the last four bids were not as difficult as I thought they would be. LSU, St. Bonaventure and Arkansas had clean enough profiles to stand out above the remaining bubble. However, that final selection was fairly brutal. I made the tough decision to exclude Maryland because they are not two games over .500 yet in D1 competition. That will be the biggest obstacle the rest of the way for the Terps. If Maryland is able to get above the two games above .500 threshold, they will be in and probably seeded much higher than a first four particpant. For today, Colorado State gets in.

- Projected Automatic Bid anomalies: New Mexico State and Howard were my preseason picks to win their conference. Sadly, neither team has been able to get back on the court yet for a conference game. Stubbornly, they remain in the bracket as projected WAC and MEAC tournament champions respectively, until they lose at least once in conference.

New Conference leaders today represented below as Automatic Bids:
ASUN - Liberty
SoCon - Wofford

West Virginia came back from a 14-day break recently to win twice in three days. Critical win over Texas Tech last night.

Bracket projections are based on 2020-21 NCAA Committee Principles and Selection Process. Projected Conference Champions are based on projected Auto-Bid winners.

At-Large Bids Stolen: 0 (Highly Unlikely)

FIRST FOUR TEAMS OUT: Pittsburgh, Maryland, Loyola-Chicago, Marquette
NEXT FOUR TEAMS OUT: Western Kentucky, Providence, Georgia Tech, Utah State
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @roccomiller8

Bracketology 01.19.21

The time has come for the first mid-season bracket update. To provide some additional thoughts for both the seeding and bracketing process for this exercise, I put together a list.

SEEDING

Battle for the fourth #1 seed. - You can make an argument for Villanova, Texas, and Iowa in this spot. I envision it being heavily debated in the committee room, if it had to be decided today. Fortunately we still have seven weeks left of runway ahead. The real dilemma is Villanova missing so much time, the pressure will be on the Wildcats to win games on shorter rest going forward, if they plan on remaining in the top seed discussion. For today, I am sticking with Nova - despite Iowa having more Quad 1 wins. Iowa still lacks the big-time win. Nova has it at Texas. Texas has it at Kansas. Make no mistake, these three are neck and neck with each other.

The Minnesota issue - Going purely off the quadrant tables, the Gophers have a top 15 resume. When you take a close look and understand that all the big wins are at home and they have been a different team on the road, one has to believe that is a red flag to the committee. For today, the Gophers have a 5-seed with the ingredients to shoot up the board, or continue to suffer from a lack of any wins outside of Minneapolis.

Louisville Sinking - The Cardinals took two tough losses at Miami and home to Florida State last week. The Cards have slipped to #37 in NET. A 4-3 record now against the top two quads is unfavorable compared to teams on the 5 or 6-seed lines. Cards hold my last 7-seed today.

Unclear Bubble - As with any January, the bubble is a massive mess right now. We may only have 28 teams that undeniably belong in the field. Our last nine spots belong to Indiana, Florida, San Diego State, North Carolina, Stanford, Utah State, Wichita State and Pittsburgh. These decisions were not simple. You can argue that Pitt and Wichita State have not beat a team yet inside the bubble. I decided to finally take Duke out of the field, they get Pitt later this week. And Utah State’s overall body of work completley depends on San Diego State right now. Since the Aztecs are still in our field, thats enough to include an Aggies team who just swept them. We have another 10-12 teams on the outside looking in that are simply one or two big wins away from replacing the bottom nine that are in. That’s how tight it is currently.

Welcome newcomers - A warm welcome to the Montana State Bobcats, UMBC Retrievers and the Jacksonville Dolphins - who enter the bracket today as fresh conference leaders.

Unbalanced Conference races - Bryant remains in the field. We normally would go with the leader in the loss column, which today is Fairleigh Dickinson for the NEC. FDU is just 1-1 however, so Bryant’s 6-2 win pct. is superior to the Knights at this point. Should FDU rip off a few wins in a row, they would likely become our NEC representative.

BRACKETING
In principle, I followed the stright-forward 1-68 s-curve seeding process. This of course was done while following the conference affiliation rules for the top 4-seed lines and the early round rematch policies. Some of the intriguing matchups that came out of this:

• Deep tradition: UCLA vs. Indiana

• Battle for Alabama: UAB vs. Alabama

• Omoruyi Family Feud: Cliff vs. Eugene (Oregon vs. Rutgers)

• Nick Musczynski Special: Belmont vs. Ohio State. Belmont’s star big man grew up in the suburbs of Columbus.

• Villanova vs. New Mexico State - if the Aggies can get enough games in I’d imagine they won’t be a #16 seed anymore. This would clearly be a rough 16-seed draw for Nova.

FIRST FOUR TEAMS OUT: Maryland, Marquette, Colorado State, Western Kentucky
NEXT FOUR TEAMS OUT: Duke, Arkansas, VCU, St. Bonaventure
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @roccomiller8

Preseason Bracketology 11.25.20

Bracket Summary

Welcome to the first of hopefully several Bracketology exercises for the 2020-21 season! This bracket build was like no other, as you may have suspected. All we know thus far is 68 teams are heading to the NCAA Tournament in the State of Indiana. We presume the sites are mostly going to be in Indianapolis, so that is represented in the bracket today. As the NCAA Selection Committee rolls out more information, we will adjust the bracketing forecasts accordingly.

How was the Preseason Bracket Built?

• Several factors go into selecting the 68 teams. This season the Ivy League decided not to participate. So we are now looking at 31 Conferences with each tournament champion receiving an automitic bid to the tournament, instead of 32. That means 37 at-large bids are available for the most deserving teams as selected by the NCAA Selection Committee.

• Removing the geography from the bracket projections during this exercise, felt bizarre - like something was completely off. I’ve been at this for a long time and so was especially different. What I found was, we don’t know which games get actually played and which ones get cancelled, and that is likely going to be the case all year. Like Texas and Stanford are both going to play in Asheville’s Maui Invitational, but no guarantee they play there. We will also see ad-hoc non-conference games in the next month, and perhaps all season long. It could create a new set of variables and opportunities for bubble teams that had their non-conference games lost.

• Several hours of zoom interviews, reading, podcasts, texting, calls, and more have gone into the past offseason. Based on every piece of info gathered, this bracket represents my best for what the season could bring us.

• I put a special emphasis on coaching pedigree and teams who play good defense. You can probably tell by Virginia being a projected 1-seed. But there are several other factors going into the projections including: percieved talent, how the pieces of a roster fit, efficiency analytics, historical research on like-teams, and others. What we do here is consistently think about all factors that can and will impact a season and/or a tournament resume.

• The projected bubble means several tough decisions for who’s in and who’s out. Northern Iowa was a late removal from the projected field, due to a COVID-19 issue that hurt their roster this week. There are a handful of teams like Marquette and Syracuse that are real difficult to make determinations on. Should be a wild ride as always, but even more so in this unparalelled campaign.

• In Part 2 of our preview, we projected Bradley to win Arch Madness again this season. Which means we are starting the Bracketology season with one bid theif.
  

Bracket projections are based on 2019-20 NCAA Committee Principles and Selection Process. Projected Conference Champions are based on projected Auto-Bid winners.

At-Large Bids Stolen: 1 (Bradley)

FIRST FOUR TEAMS OUT: Northern Iowa, Arkansas, Marquette, South Carolina
NEXT FOUR TEAMS OUT: Purdue, SMU, UNC-Greensboro, Syracuse
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @roccomiller8

FINAL Bracketology 2020

Bracket Summary

After 11 days of reflection and no basketball, I finally decided to clean up a final bracketology post for the 2020 season. The season itself had so many great stories happen, from Dayton to San Diego State to Baylor to East Tennessee State, we are left to sit and wonder how this whole thing would have played out. Perhaps in future decades, we will look back on this season with a clearer perspective and more appreciation. In any event, it is time to take a look at the best possible guess on what Selection Sunday may or would have looked like.

First, some updates

• Last week, Kansas HC Bill Self revealed that Kansas would have selected to be in the Houston Regional instead of the heavily forecasted Indianapolis Regional. As the projected overall #1 seed, Kansas would have had that luxury. And it makes some logical sense. Many of the teams in Big 10 country, places like Kentucky and Louisville, and even teams like Butler would also prefer to play in Indianapolis. The thinking here from Kansas was, why compete for tickets in Indianapolis against other large fan bases, when we can remain near the Big 12 footprint in Houston and have a lot less competition for ticket share. Thusly, Houston made more sense, percentage-wise, for KU to gain the largest possible home court advantage. This final bracket projection now reflects this choice.

• The domino effect from the Kansas decision starts on the 3-seed line. Kentucky was able to conveniently move over to the Indianapolis Region (Baylor is the top seed) and maintain competitive balance within the top 16 teams on the overall seed list, a bracketing requirement. That then meant shifts were required for all of the remaining 3-seeds. Duke shifted to the East, Michigan State shifted to the South, and the final 3-seed Seton Hall was placed in the West.

• The next major shift requirement came with BYU. BYU could no longer be part of the same sub-region as Kansas. With those games now in Houston slated for Friday/Sunday, that means BYU will not be able to participate there. BYU is required to play in a Thursday/Saturday regional. The Cougars were ultimately moved to the Indianapilis-based Midwest Region. This caused the other 5-seeds to reshuffle as well with the exception of Ohio State, who remained in the West.

• Lines 6-10 had a few additional tweaks. The most noteworthy was Colorado’s loss in the Pac-12 Tournament’s opening round. This caused a drop on the seed list for the Buffaloes, and landed them on the 8-seed line. This allowed Saint Mary’s to move up to a 7-seed.

• For the Bubble, Xavier’s loss to DePaul was just enough to knock the Muskateers out of the field entirely. I personally sympothize for any team that had to take the court on that final day (Wednesday, March 11). The news came in rapidly throughout that Wednesday. Several announcements of tournaments moving to no fans and more. By the end of the evening, we knew the NBA had suspended play. Yet, College Basketball carried on late into Wednesday night.
  
  Players and Coaches were tasked with having to play through the adversity. You could visibly see some motivational differences in these games versus what we always are accustomed to seeing during a hard-fought Championship Week. As badly as I want to disregard the results of that day, the fact is I cannot. The games were still played and sanctioned by the NCAA. The results have to be treated as part of the season for the purpose of this exercise. If for any reason the NCAA Tournament was later played after suspension, the committee would’ve a difficult time making this decision, but would have reached the same conclusion. No team was penalized more by playing on this day than Xavier, with their loss that night. It is mostly a moot point now, since the tournament did not happen.

• Boston University won the Patriot League Tournament Championship Game on Colgate’s home court. That game was played with tremendous energy and had a ton of excitement. Especially considering that it happened on the evening of March 11th as well. Congratulations to the Terriers on winning the Patriot League Tournament trophy, something they will cherish forever.

• The AAC Tournament never tipped off. And it left the final bracket in a position to accept Cincinnati as the auto-bid and afforded the AAC to recieve three bids. I believe that if the games did happen and either Houston or Wichita State won the AAC Tournament, the AAC would have concluded as a 2-bid league. Interesting how this season-long bracket forecasting saga for the AAC’s bid totals will never will be resolved.

Bracket projections are based on 2019-20 NCAA Committee Principles and Selection Process. Projected Conference Champions are based on projected Auto-Bid winners.

At-Large Bids Stolen: 1 (Cincinnati)

FIRST FOUR TEAMS OUT: Xavier, Texas, Northern Iowa, Stanford
NEXT FOUR TEAMS OUT: Mississippi State, St. Louis, Memphis, Arkansas
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @roccomiller8

Bracketology 03.10.20

New Conference leaders since previous bracket. Represented below as Automatic Bids:
AAC - Cincinnati
Big East - Creighton
Big South - Winthrop (AUTO-bid secured)
Horizon - Northern Kentucky
MVC - Bradley (AUTO-bid secured)
MWC - Utah State (AUTO-bid secured)

Bracket projections are based on 2019-20 NCAA Committee Principles and Selection Process. Projected Conference Champions are based on projected Auto-Bid winners.

At-Large Bids Stolen: 1 (Cincinnati)

FIRST FOUR TEAMS OUT: NC State, Texas, Stanford, Northern Iowa
NEXT FOUR TEAMS OUT: Mississippi State, St. Louis, Memphis, Arkansas

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @roccomiller8