If Christmas is just around the corner, it can only mean one thing: It’s time for the first in-season NCAA Tournament bracket projection.
As is typical of this time of year, the vast majority of the games have been nonconference games, so there are few actual conference leaders based on conference play. However, I will determine the automatic qualifier for each conference the same way I always do. That is, I take the team with the fewest conference losses and use the NET to break ties. There is a lot of tiebreaking going on in this bracket.
That is also the only time I am using any of the metrics for any part of this bracket. There just isn’t enough data yet to make them reliable. So, if you don’t like where I put your team, it wasn’t because their KenPom.com ranking wasn’t high enough or their WAB was wobbly or anything like that.
There are some new metrics on the committee’s radar this season. BartTorvik.com’s rankings are now on the team sheets, replacing Jeff Sagarin’s rankings, which he retired right before last season started.
One interesting thing about Torvik’s rankings is that it has some recency bias built into them. However, the committee itself does not use recency bias in its process. Games played in November mean just as much as those played in February.
Also new is Wins Above Bubble (WAB), which is simply a calculation to determine how many wins a given team would be expected to have in comparison to the average bubble team against the same schedule. The NCAA is calculating that based on the average bubble team being the team ranked 45th in the NET.
Bracketology top seeds
Check out Palm’s bracket and full field of 68 at the Bracketology hub.
The bracketing rules are going to take a beating until conference play gets going and sorts some of these teams out. The SEC has seven teams in the top 16 of the bracket, including the top two teams in Auburn and Tennessee. I’ve been doing brackets for a very long time and never had one league with this many teams in the top 16. Suffice it to say, the conference is off to a great start this season and it would be stunning if it did not have the most teams in the final bracket in March, even if it does not in this one.
That’s right. The Big Ten has one more at 13. The two leagues combine for 25 teams in the field. The SEC is much more dominant at the top, however. The Big Ten only has two teams in the top 16 and 11 on the next eight seed lines.
Oh, and there are also eight Big 12 teams in the field. That means that 30 of the 37 at-large teams in the bracket come from just three conferences. That will probably not be the case in March.
The only team not in power conference with an at-large spot in this bracket is San Diego State.
Fortunately, the seeds of those seven SEC teams at the top worked out so that I did not have to bracket any of them to meet prior to the Elite Eight.
Joining Auburn and Tennessee on the top line of the bracket are Iowa State and Duke. The Cyclones’ only loss of the season came against Auburn in the Maui Invitational. Duke is the only team to defeat the Tigers, doing so at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Auburn has a greater concern at the moment. National player of the year candidate Johnni Broome injured his shoulder in the first few minutes of the game against Georgia State on Tuesday, His status for the matchup with Purdue on Saturday is in doubt, but it was reported that he will not need surgery to repair the problem. He is expected back sooner rather than later and reportedly is traveling with the team to Birmingham, Alabama, for Saturday’s game.
Finally, a piece of trivia for you. Among teams with both wins and losses, only Indiana’s games have all had double-digit scoring margins. Mississippi Valley State and Coppin State also have nothing but double-digit losses, but they are still winless against D-I opposition.
The regular schedule of Monday and Friday brackets will begin on Jan. 3.
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