Better late than never, eh?
Apologies for the extremely late bracket—one posted whilst conference tournament games are being played—but I promised a projection on Wednesday, and I have delivered! Yay.
That said, I wouldn’t take today’s projection super seriously. I did throw it together fairly quickly, in the span of about three or four hours, without being able to really take a deep dive into each team’s résumés. The seed list and bracket that you’ll really want to pay attention to is the one that I release on Saturday, as that’ll be close to the final product. At that point, 95% of bids and seeds will have been solidified; only a handful of minor shakeups on Saturday night and Sunday will take place to change the final form of my bracket.
If you’re curious as to how this in-depth résumé analysis and scrubbing process will go down, I invite you to join me on my Twitter page on Friday for Bauertology Live! A new Friday-before-Selection-Sunday tradition that I introduced last year, Bauertology Live will see me live tweeting the seed list as I work it out one-by-one, giving my full, in-depth explanations for every choice I make. It only makes sense that my (nearly) final bracket of the year should be my most thorough! It’s also a lot of fun, so come take a peek if you’ve got time on Friday morning.
Now, as the selection committee prepares to convene, lengthy writeups on the Bauertology website will be lessened to more acute details as to what in specific I’m looking at. Here are a few of those key things:
- The Battle for Last 1 Seed: What seemed like easy pickings for the 1 line got a wrench thrown in it on the final Saturday of the regular season, as Alabama beat Auburn in the Jungle to put themselves back in the conversation for the last 1 seed. It’s very difficult for me to leave a team that is top-3 in résumé metrics with nine Quad 1A wins (the most of any) off the 1 line… but I do think Alabama’s seven losses have to be taken into consideration, as does Florida’s win at Coleman Coliseum not long ago. I’m sticking with the Gators… for now.
- The Low 5 through High 8 Seeds: Good god, this portion of the bracket is a mess. My teams ranked 19th through 31st could conceivably be put in just about any order, and it would at least be somewhat believable. In my years of bracketology, I can’t ever recall this region of the bracket being so bunched; they’re basically all 6 seeds that need to be spread across three seed lines. As such, multiple teams are going to feel slighted at their final seed, and I don’t blame them. I just hope we get an ounce of clarity on how to sort these teams over the coming days.
- The Bottom of the At-Large Field: I admittedly feel pretty comfortable with the teams I have in and teams I have out at the moment, and I think it’s going to be fairly tough for any of the teams I have out to leapfrog any of the teams I have in. It is worth noting that I have a “bid thief” in today’s bracket, UC Irvine, as a result of the Anteaters placing higher than UC San Diego in my résumé metric BRCT, so they get the Big West automatic bid for now, until that’s sorted out later this week. And I’m cool with that; we are very likely going to get at least one bid thief from the American, or Atlantic 10, or some other conference, so projecting one in the field currently helps me to adjust for that scenario if and when it happens down the line.
Are you starting to feel the pressure? I know I am. Here’s the full Bauertology bracket and seed list for Wednesday, March 12 (today’s results thus far not included). Enjoy!
