Bracket busting

As always, a reminder that the Tournament Challenge is still looking for entrants. E-mail bigflax (at) gmail (dot) com, or comment. Also, the Tournament Challenge page is now up and will be linked at right for the duration of the tournament.

As every year, thoughts on the brackets.

The committee sent the right message in general - playing and winning big games early, and doing well in your conference, will get you in and get you a good seed. Seeing teams like Southern Illinois and Butler on top-five seed lines had to be gratifying to mid-major programs that have that kind of ambition. If you can get the games and win them, you will be rewarded, regardless of conference.

That said, this was NOT a good year for the mid-majors as a whole. First of all, only six mid-major schools got at-large bids, half as many as in 2004 - and this after last year's George Mason revelation (to say nothing of Bradley, Wichita State and Wisconsin-Milwaukee). The six - #4 SIU, #5 Butler, #7 Nevada, #8 BYU, #9 Xavier, and #12 Old Dominion. In other words, the committee generally did not feel that mid-major at-large bids should go to anyone but teams that won their regular-season conference titles and were pretty dominant all year, ODU being the only exception (and by the seed, obviously being one of the last three teams in).

Instead, it was a good year for power-conference leavings. Stanford? Arkansas? Illinois? Not that inspiring. Arkansas lost 13 games, for crying out loud! On the other hand, look at the teams on the outside looking in - aside from Drexel and Air Force, most of the omitted teams are also power conference teams (Syracuse, Kansas State, West Virginia, Florida State). This just wasn't that great a year for the mid-majors, it seems - either they couldn't get the games or they couldn't win enough of them. Given the lack of buzz for most mid-majors, then, we probably can't complain too much about who the committee did let in - Air Force walloped Stanford in Palo Alto, but slumped down the stretch, so could you really take them first?

One place where I thought the comittee screwed the mid-majors a little bit was in pairing them against each other. How will the mids have a chance to shine when half are gone by Round 2? For example, Butler draws Old Dominion, BYU faces Xavier, and Nevada plays Creighton. That's five of the six at-large mid-majors in three games! This is going to make it way too easy for Billy Packer to crow about how the mid-majors are clearly not pulling their weight. It's very hard for me to believe that this was anything other than a TV decision - why match up BYU/Villanova and Kentucky/Xavier and get two middlingly-rated games, when you can match up Villanova/Kentucky and get one big number, since BYU/Xavier will probably get just as good a rating as BYU/Villanova and Kentucky/Xavier each would have? I don't know if my math (or lack thereof) is solid here, but at the very least it's suspicious. Why wouldn't you want to match a power-conference team with a mid-major team and see what the latter can do? It's not that there aren't games like that, but they're mostly between teams with bigger seed line differences. At the 7-10 and 8-9 level, only two of eight games match mid-major opposition with a power-conference team - and not only are both of those the two most successful mid-majors of the last 20 years who everyone knows now, Gonzaga and UNLV, but UNLV is actually the higher seed in their game against Georgia Tech. Meanwhile, two further games on those lines match mid-majors exclusively. Color me unimpressed.

Other than that, though, not too many complaints. It was an interesting year for seedings, with a lot of less-traditional teams ending up in the 3-6 range, and I think it could well yield a high number of first round upsets. At the risk of giving anything away, here are my preliminary looks at the brackets:

EAST
Possible Final Four teams: #1 North Carolina, #2 Georgetown, #4 Texas.
Possible sleeper: #7 Boston College. Georgetown appears to be peaking, which isn't good news for BC (if they can even get past Bob Knight and Texas Tech in Round One), but if BC can shock the Hoyas, the bracket opens up - this is probably the weakest 3-6 pairing in the entire tournament with Washington State and Vanderbilt. BC is inconsistent but could go all the way to the Elite Eight if they can just string together a couple good games.
Possible first-round upset: Both #14 Oral Roberts (which gave Memphis a good game as a #16 last year) and #11 George Washington (against a Vandy team that doesn't play that well away from home) have realistic shots, and don't count out #12 Arkansas - after getting thumped by Oregon, USC is limping into the tournament.

SOUTH
Possible Final Four teams: #1 Ohio State, #2 Memphis, #3 Texas A&M, #6 Louisville.
Possible sleeper: #5 Tennessee. After last year's close call against Winthrop, I can see the Vols being a trendy pick to get upset, and that isn't unfair. But they can go as far as a hot-shooting Chris Lofton can take them, and one never knows if that's going to be one round or three.
Possible first-round upset: As a 16 seed last year, Albany gave #1 UConn everything it could handle before finally bowing out. This year the Great Danes are up to a #13 and facing a relatively green Virginia team without many big wins this year and some pretty bad losses, including by 24 to Utah in Puerto Rico.

MIDWEST
Possible Final Four teams: #1 Florida, #2 Wisconsin, #3 Oregon, #4 Maryland.
Possible sleeper: #8 Arizona. Lute Olson's team always has a ton of talent, but this year it didn't quite come together. The fact that they still won 20 games speaks to the level of play they're capable of, though. Florida should be Purdue's biggest fan in Round One to avoid having to run with the Wildcats in Round Two.
Possible first-round upset: Plenty to go around. Notre Dame looks ripe for Winthrop's picking in the 6-11 game, but the 4-13 and 5-12 games could both yield upsets as well. Maryland finished strong until the Miami loss, but Davidson finished even stronger (if against lesser competition) and has a dangerous scorer in Dell Curry's son Stephen. As for the 5-12, we always learn that mid-majors seem to play better when not the favorites. Butler could gag a game they're expected to win, and a tough matchup with ODU won't help the chances that it happens.

WEST
Possible Final Four teams: #1 Kansas, #2 UCLA. Pretty hard not to picture one of these two advancing to Atlanta.
Possible sleeper: It pains me to say it, but #6 Duke. Coach K isn't the most successful coach in tourney history for no reason. On the other hand, Duke doesn't have a good recent history out of anything other than the top line (not that they've been below it much) - remember 1997, when a #2 Duke team got bounced by Providence in Round 2.
Possible first-round upset: Low seeds from power conferences often seem to do well - remember Florida State in 1998, Oklahoma in 1999, and Missouri in 2002? Well, watch out for Illinois here - Virginia Tech is not a tourney-tested team, and some nice ACC wins helped mask a pretty unimpressive OOC schedule. Plus, the Hokies can be super-inconsistent. #13 Holy Cross over #4 SIU is another possibility - see my earlier point about mid-majors not doing so well as the favorites and throw in that Holy Cross came very close to upsets in 2001 and 2002 as 15 and 16 seeds (and against big-name programs in Kentucky and Kansas).

For those of you in the Challenge, I'll get the electronic Excel bracket out tomorrow, but feel free to send me your picks sooner than that if you're the type to bang them out. Just make sure they're in a comprehensible format.