The first mid-conference-tournament-play Bauertology is here!
Selection Sunday is just nine days away, and postseason tournaments for a number of smaller conferences are now in full swing. In fact, Big South tournament action between projected automatic bid High Point and Radford is going on as I write this. (Please win so today’s bracket doesn’t look dumb immediately, Panthers!)
As such, we’ve already seen our first conference tournament 1 seed and projected auto-bid go down with Eastern Kentucky getting upset in the ASUN quarterfinals. Now, as the highest remaining seed alive, Stetson takes their spot, hoping to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever since becoming a Division I program in 1971. Go Hatters!
Two other new names enter the field today: 1) Sam Houston, overtaking Louisiana Tech as the C-USA’s projected auto-bid by virtue of the Bearkats’ victory over the Bulldogs last night, and 2) Colorado, whose big-time Quad 1 road win over Oregon last night finally gives their team sheet a little more meat. I’m still not thrilled with the overall quality of their victories, what with their lone win (home vs. Washington State) over a current at-large team, but given how good their metrics look now in both résumé and efficiency status, with no Q3 losses or worse, I think it’s enough to squeeze them into the field for now. I think an apt comparison for them would be NC State from a year ago, which also just slotted in as an 11 despite underwhelming quality of victories, thanks to some handy metrics and bad loss avoidance.
But major changes from here on out will be few and far between. The selection committee starts its meetings in less than a week, so teams need to make their cases as good as possible by about next Wednesday if they want to feel any semblance of safety. After that, all bets are off!
With that in mind, here’s the Bauertology bracket and seed list for Friday, March 8. Crazy to think we’re nearing the end here—likely only two or three more bracket projections and one or two more Bubble Watches to go. It all goes by too fast!
BAUERTOLOGY 