A week and a day—that’s all the time left between us and the Madness.
And thank goodness for that! Not only because I want to savor these final fleeting moments of pre-tournament goodness during Champ Week, but also because today’s bracket is kind of a mess.
Any time you have a major shift at the top, such as Florida claiming the last 1 seed over Alabama with the Gators’ win in Tuscaloosa on Wednesday evening, you’re going to get a ripple effect all the way down the bracket. That’s how I ended up with unavoidable second-round rematches like Illinois-Alabama and Kentucky-Louisville (spicy!). Promise there’s no nefarious doings here for the sake of TV ratings, as you may also notice in the potential Chris Beard homecoming matchup of Ole Miss-Texas Tech. This is just how the bracket naturally fell into place!
I also had to do some shuffling of the Last Four In; having four Big Ten teams on the 4/5 lines and two more in the First Four along the 11/12 lines made for a major headache, especially when you remember that at least one of those First Four matchups has to be in a Friday/Sunday pod. A potential second-round rematch between Ohio State and Purdue created the path of least resistance, so this is what I settled on.
And BYU… oh, boy, BYU. The Cougars are extremely lucky that I was able to sneak them into my last 6 seed. If I had BYU as a 7, we’d have issues abound, as each of the 7/10 AND 8/9 subregional pods that they would slot into in the East and West Regions (i.e., the two legal regions for BYU) are Friday/Sunday—a.k.a., a no go. This means that, per the committee’s rules, BYU would have to slide all the way down to an 11 seed and fit into either Texas A&M’s Wichita pod or St. John’s Providence. And that would be utterly ridiculous! Be thankful that I chose mercy, Cougars.
And that brings us to the bracket. We will have our first official automatic bid locked up later today, as Southeast Missouri and SIUE play for the Ohio Valley crown. In the meantime, I’m still using my résumé metric BRCT as the means of determining who gets the auto-bid in each conference, though with South Dakota State falling in yesterday’s quarterfinals, the Summit League auto-bid now goes to the highest remaining team, Omaha. This whittling down will continue all throughout Champ Week as conference tournament winners are named.
That’ll do it for introductions; here are the Bauertology bracket and seed list for Saturday, March 8. Let’s hope things clean themselves up a little bit over this final week.
