:+1:

UCLA/VCU is gonna be a fun one.

they got an easy walk to the sweet 16. Wisconsin stinks and Xavier isn't great

Wisconsin beats FSU in round one, OSU might give Pitt a run for their money.

edit to add: Duke beats Binghamton by 40+, beats Texas by double digits.

Which B10 teams have not been named yet?

There has to be at least one left in the remaining bracket.

Bring on Texas.

Michagin hasn't

Not sure I have seen Ohio State, either, now that I think of it.

OSU was an 8 seed in the first bracket revealed

I say terrible because I am selfish and I wanted to see them play in Miami so I can watch them play. I think we make it out the first but maybe not the second. If we do it setups up a match up with Pitt and then eventually Duke if we win...that would be interesting.

man, LSU plumetted

Wow I *love* UNC's draw.

Michigan gets in and I think wins over Clemson

The aforementioned The Bracket Project's Bracket Matrix
Only miss on teams was San Diego State out & Arizona in.

yeah, The 'Zags could give them trouble. A OK -UNC game would be great

No Kentucky.

THe Gillespie watch is on

I haven't seen Michigan enough, but, my impression of Clemson is that they pretty much decide their own fate against all but the absolute best of teams. If they play well they beat anyone in the country. If they don't they lose to a 16 seed caliber team. I wouldn't be surprised to see them in the sweet 16. I also wouldn't be surprised to see them lose to Michigan by 20.

Pretty wild that the Big East's lowest seeds were a pair of 6s.

I think I will be surprised if there are less than 5 BE teams that make it to the Sweet 16.

My own mock bracket got 64/65 only missing Arizona when I had St. Mary's. I ended up with 52/65 within 1 seed line. Some of that might be not trying to bracekt which could cause some seeds to move.

Biggest misses for me on seeds was Wisconsin, LSU, Butler of 3 seeds off.

I hate these committee interviews..it's like interviewing the baseball HOF voters. There's inexplicable black magic that happens every year. It doesn't matter what they say. It's all just a pile of bullshit.

Does anyone know when they will post the times for the games?

That's a really tough draw. The rest of the bracket looks like a good setup for WVU as I think they could hang with Kansas or MSU if it came to it. I really don't like playing Dayton in the 1st round, though.

They really took a shit on top of the mid-majors this year. Apparently the RPI means absolutely nothing.

They used to adhere more closely to the RPI than they do now. What happened was, about five years ago, they changed the RPI formula to reward road wins more, and devalue home wins.

This resulted in mid-majors' RPIs improving and some majors' RPIs getting worse. From that point on, the committee began to use the RPI *much* more casually.

Agreed. Not a team in there that I am terrified to match up with, but we could also get popped in the first game.

No kidding...

SI

Yup

SI

Who is the little shit talking to Vitale (not that I really like Vitale) right now?

SI

anyone setting up a Yahoo bracket?

The most obvious solution to getting more mid-majors into the tournament (for those who want that to happen) would be to reduce the number of automatic bids for, I don't know what to call them, "not even mid-majors". There's at least a half dozen bids that could have more justifiably been given to the San Diego States of the world.

very happy with SU's draw and the 3 seed. I think they get the weakest 2 but the toughest 1 (even if the committee made Louisville the top 1)

Kind of like the BCS. The committee is full of shit. They used to use the RPI until mid-majors started getting in (and doing well).

LSU's draw is a mixed bag. If they weren't going to give us a benefit of the doubt (losing 3 of the last 4, I don't blame them for not..) Butler is actually a good 9 seed matchup for us. A four guard lineup without a dominate forward is something we should be able to take care of.

UNC in the second round, that could be a horror show. We haven't been able to stop players like Hansbrough all year... We would have to play our best game of the season to win that one.

Yup, again

SI

No, Bobby, 128 teams is the *wrong* answer

SI

I'm glad Louisville got the #1 overall, but I think it's a crock of shit they might have to play Ohio State in Dayton in round 2. Meanwhile, UNC sits in it's usual home state for the first two rounds.

Or using the RPI like they used to which gave credit for winning on the road which is the only thing mid-majors can do. The RPI was a great way of getting mid-majors into the tournament since it didn't have a bias like the committee has.

I'm resisting support for a larger tournament, but I at least have to stop and think about it now -- where I used to dismiss it completely. This was a 64-team field 25 years ago with 270 or so D-1 teams. Now there's 350 D-1 teams and it's a 65-team field.

I'd still say it's generally true that everyone who has any remote possibility of winning the national title gets in. However, the George Mason example from 2006 pushes this argument to the limit, as they were a bubble mid-major that barely got in over vociferous objection, and then almost won the whole tournament.

I think, in all likelihood St. Mary's was a team limping along with an injured star, and were likely not going to go very deep into the tournament. But... Mills is a hell of a player when healthy, the kind of special talent that is capable of picking a team up and carrying them a few rounds (like Curry last year). Who knows? We don't get to find out now.

I have to admit, I'm enjoying the bitching about mid-majors getting "screwed" by the committee considering the anti-BCS threads were full of how the NCAA tournament is great and mid-majors get their chance. Now its "the mid-majors don't get enough chances against good teams during the regular season" or the committee *gasp* has evolved the way they evaluate teams.

The fact is you're arguing over teams that lost their chance at an auto-bid and teams that could have done more during the regular season anyways. Arizona and Minnesota probably don't deserve to be in, but it really doesn't mean shit in the grand scheme of things.

These mid-major conferences could stop screwing over their own members by handing the auto-bid to whatever team gets hot the last 3-4 games of the season and reward the team that actually wins the conference win a trip to the NCAA tourney.

Looks like Kentucky has only had a hosting site for the first two rounds once this decade(and hosted a regional final once). Dayton looks like as common a first two rounds site as Greensboro or Charlotte. I'm surprised Louisville and Kentucky's arenas haven't hosted more tournament games lately.

Of course, Louisville is only 75 miles further away than Ohio State is to Dayton. Surely that isn't going to be that big a problem for the overall #1 seed :P

thisthisthisthisthis

They evolved the way they evaluate teams not to get in the best teams, but to get in the biggest teams. Our issue is that the best teams are not getting in.

And if you want to bash the mid-majors for giving auto-bids to the tourney champs, shouldn't you be for dropping an at-large from the PAC-10 and SEC? Those conferences gave their auto-bid to schools that just got hot for a few days.

I'm good with this, in theory. It does make sense, especially for the smaller leagues. The big problem that I imagine is that these conference teams need the money from the conference tourney. I imagine there will be less interest if an NIT is the best reward and that's assuming the NIT would amend their rules for that (which I think they would).

SI

But those conferences still got their best teams in, in addition to getting an additional team in and making some decent money off a tourney.

I wouldn't mind seeing an expansion to like 96 and having 32 teams get a first round bye. But saying to expand for St Mary's sake and make the good teams play 7 games is ridiculous.

I really don't see much worth even a half-hearted gripe this year, not a single team not in the field that I think has anyone to blame for their absence so much as themselves. Penn State probably comes the closest but that would have been another power conference team anyway.

If you expand to 96 then there will be a 97th team that gets screwed and so on and so on.

If you are a mid major that got screwed to bad, win your conference tournament.

One good point someone made was that giving your automatic bids to the regular season champ may be a better option. The Southern Conference would have Davidson in the tourney who is better than a lot of the at-large seeds.

Though in the case of St. Mary's, they're in a mid-major conference with a nationally elite program. A bit of a unique situation not facing the typical mid-major (CUSA teams have it even tougher -- they gotta win the tourney IN Memphis).

To your first point, again... this is true, but in 2006, the last (or maybe second-to-last) at-large team, a team that easily could have been left out, made the Final Four. At some point, if the overall number of D-1 teams continues to increase (and I'm sure it will), 65 teams is going to get impractical and some sort of tournament expansion will be the pragmatic solution, imperfect though it may be.

Eh... Davidson's really not that good this year. Curry's great, but they don't belong in the field.