Bracketology – Staff Bracket (Monday, December 4th)

This week it is our colleague John Stalica’s turn to do his initial Staff Bracket for the 2023-24 season. This is not a prediction of who the Selection Committee would pick (as Jon Teitel will begin making those predictions in January), but rather who John feels would be selected as of this checkpoint. Below is the bracket:

First Four Out: Nevada, Auburn, Iowa State, New Mexico

Worth a Look: Michigan State, George Mason, Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Georgia Tech

COMMENTS FROM JOHN:

After many programs took on their first loss of the season, Arizona moves up to the #1 overall seed through games played through Sunday. Purdue remains a #1 seed despite a loss at Northwestern, but still gets credit for wins in the Maui Invitational (i.e. Marquette, Gonzaga and Tennessee).

Colorado State and BYU are looking like they’ll compete for not only protected seeds, but protected seeds where they’ll be competing for a seed in the West Region. Keep in mind that BYU can only be placed in either the West or the East Regionals because of the inability of BYU to play on Sunday.

The big UTR winners that are above the cut line right now are Indiana State (at-large) and Appalachian State as the last team above the First Four. Drake would be considered the auto-bid winner of the Missouri Valley for purposes of this exercise.

I have teams like Nevada and Michigan State out for the time being simply because they don’t have any Tier 1 or Tier 2 wins yet on their profiles (at least according to the daily JNG rating). Apparently, being undefeated doesn’t matter anymore. Right, Florida State football team?