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Before you look at the bracket, I want to make sure everyone knows what they are looking at. These are NOT my guesses is to what the actual Selection Committee’s Final bracket will look like on Selection Sunday in March. It is also not an attempt to guess what the actual Selection Committee would do if they were picking the field today. These are simply my own picks, and this is a CHECKPOINT based on CURRENT MERIT, and not a ranking of how good I think the teams actually are. I’m only really asking myself one question. How hard is it to win the games that this team has won?? That’s really it.
For instance, I personally think Auburn is really good, but I have them seeded kind of poorly. The reason is that at this point in time, they just haven’t won any games that really jump of the page.
If the season were a 40-minute game, we’d be about at the under-12 media timeout in the 1st half. There is a long way to go and I’m not trying to guess the future. Metaphorically speaking, I’m just trying to show what I think the score is at the under-12 1st half timeout.
Some notes and comments are listed below…
-Conference Champions are notated with an (*)
-Any teams that needed to move seedlines in order to meet bracketing rules have their original seed indicated in (parenthesis)
OTHERS CONSIDERED: Mississippi State, Florida, Duke, Liberty, NC State, Boston College, Saint John’s, Butler, Duquesne, Pittsburgh, Oregon, Nebraska, Xavier, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Iowa, Saint Bonaventure, Southern Illinois, Texas Tech, Indiana, Texas, TCU, Washington State
COMMENTS FROM DAVID:
-What impresses me most is notable wins away from home. The #1 seeds have all done that and I think they’ve started to set themselves apart. Purdue did lose the one true road game that they’ve played, but they’ve beaten so many good teams on neutral sites that it’s impossible to not give them credit for that and recognize that they are one of the best teams in the nation.
-A team like Duke, who was the last team in, has not done a damn thing away from home yet, and has even lost to a Georgia Tech team that is unlikely to make the NIT. I do think Duke is good, and I certainly think they will end up in the NCAA Tournament with a good seed, but this is a checkpoint and not a forecast.
-I really like what teams like Saint Joseph’s and Princeton have done. They’ve played a lot of games that aren’t necessarily against ranked teams, but that were away from home and hard to win and they’ve won the vast majority of them. Joe’s does have the one ugly loss to TAMU-Commerce, and that alone could warrant not being seeded anywhere near where I have them, but I think all their good wins have offset that.
-James Madison is unbeaten and a lot of people will probably try and say they deserve a much better seed than where I have them. While that may be true, in the current state of things that win against Michigan State isn’t quite as valuable as it appeared it would be at the time.
-The earlier in the year it is, the harder this is to do! At least if you’re trying to only measure merit.