So, who’s actually good in college basketball?
Since the last bracket I posted on Monday—a mere four days ago—five of my top 10 teams were defeated. Kansas, the team I once claimed had the undisputed best résumé in the land, no longer sits on that throne. UConn, a team that once looked like a shoe-in for a 1 seed, has plummeted in conference play. Even Gonzaga, the dominant force in the WCC, winners of 75 straight games at home, slipped up and let Loyola Marymount snap their streak. Just madness!
And so when everyone loses… everyone wins, I guess? That is to say, a lot more things stay put than you would expect. As I mentioned in my last post, it’s so easy to overreact to every single result and how it affects the postseason, when in reality, it takes a season’s worth of results, in addition to the new stuff, to make an accurate bracket. So changes from projection to projection are less dependent on single results and more dependent on trends.
You do see this in today’s bracket—UConn is in danger of falling to a 4 seed not longer after being my #1 overall team, and Ohio State is in absolute free fall, falling out of the bracket for the first time and allowing West Virginia to slip back in after their crucial win over TCU—but it’s mostly a lot of minor seed shuffling (and the inclusion of two new projected minor conference auto-bids—hello, UC Riverside and Binghamton!).
That said, these trends do make the bracket a bit of a mess to put together… This could be the least confident I’ve felt in one of my brackets so far, just because so many teams could be seeded in so many places. So if you’ve got a criticism, it may be valid! But check out the new Bauertology bracket anyway, and let me know what you think! Constructive criticism always appreciated, and reach out if you catch any clerical errors!
THE BRACKET
THE TRUE SEED LIST, BUBBLE, AND BIDS BY CONFERENCE
