Due to a couple of results from the past week, the four #1 seeds in this year's tournament are far from certain. Virginia and Dook are in (and one of them will be #1 overall), but there are conceivably 4 teams for the last 2 spots. Will the ACC get three #1 seeds, something a conference has done only once before? Will Gonzaga remain on the top line even after losing handily to a bid stealer? Or will the SEC and Big 10 get one or both?
I'm using the Bracket Matrix to try to answer this question, which is a compilation of 51 publicly available brackets, all trying to predict what the committee will do in a few hours. This compilation currently has North Carolina barely hanging on to the last #1 seed and Gonzaga solidly at #3 overall. But mine is a bigger question: who is getting boxed out of the top line?
I'm assuming that Kentucky has no shot; "Only twice in the past nine years has a 1-seed been given to a team that didn't win either its regular-season or conference tournament title." So that leaves the other 4 described above, Gonzaga/North Carolina/Tennessee/Michigan St. I then looked at every #1 seed combination on the Bracket Matrix:
We can really ignore the last 2, which were last updated before Dook won and Kentucky lost yesterday. Of the rest, each team was left out:
The ideological differences in the brackets are interesting. It looks like it comes down to Gonzaga vs Tennessee, as 31 of the 49 predictions I considered only contain one of these two schools, and only 12 leave off North Carolina in favor of BOTH Gonzaga and Tennessee. And none of these combined 43 have Michigan St.
We'll see tonight if the committee follows the majority of forecasters here (31/49) and chooses one of Gonzaga or Tennessee, or if they go contrarian (12/49) and leave off North Carolina.
No comments:
Post a Comment