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.
That is, I take the team with the fewest conference losses and use the NET to break ties.
The NCAA is calculating that based on the average bubble team being the team ranked 45th in the NET.
The SEC has seven teams in the top 16 of the bracket, including the top two teams in Auburn and Tennessee.
Joining Auburn and Tennessee on the top line of the bracket are Iowa State and Duke.
If Christmas is approaching, it can only mean that the first NCAA Tournament bracket projection of the season is about to happen.
As is common at this time of year, there aren’t many conference leaders based on conference play because the great majority of the games have been nonconference games. But as usual, I will choose the automatic qualifier for every conference. In other words, I break ties with the team that has the fewest conference losses using the NET. This bracket has a lot of tiebreaking going on.
I only use any of the metrics for that portion of this bracket at that point. Simply put, there is not yet enough information to establish their reliability. Therefore, if you’re unhappy with where I put your team, it wasn’t because their WAB was shaky or their KenPom . com ranking wasn’t high enough.
This season, the committee is looking at a few new metrics. The team sheets now display the rankings from BartTorvik.com, which Jeff Sagarin retired just before the start of the previous season.
One intriguing feature of Torvik’s rankings is that they contain a certain amount of recency bias. Nonetheless, recency bias is not used by the committee itself in its operations. November games are just as important as February games.
Wins Above Bubble (WAB) is another new concept. It is a simple calculation that shows how many wins a team should have compared to the average bubble team on the same schedule. The team ranked 45th in the NET is used by the NCAA to calculate that average bubble team.
The top seeds of bracketology.
View Palm’s bracket and complete field of 68 at the Bracketology hub.
The bracketing rules will be subjected to a lot of abuse until conference play begins and some of these teams are resolved. The top two teams, Auburn and Tennessee, are among the seven SEC teams in the bracket’s top 16. In all the time I’ve been doing brackets, I’ve never seen a league with this many teams in the top 16. To put it simply, the conference is off to a fantastic start this year, and even if it doesn’t have the most teams in this bracket, it would be amazing if it didn’t have the most teams in the March final bracket.
You’re correct. At 13, the Big Ten will have another. There are 25 teams in the field from the two leagues combined. At the top, though, the SEC has far more power. There are just two teams in the top 16 and eleven on the next eight seed lines in the Big Ten.
In addition, eight Big 12 teams are competing. Because of this, only three conferences account for thirty of the 37 at-large teams in the bracket. Most likely, that won’t be the case in March.
San Diego State is the only non-power conference team in this bracket with an at-large spot.
Luckily, the seeds of those seven top-seeded SEC teams aligned, so I didn’t have to bracket any of them before the Elite Eight.
Iowa State and Duke are on the same bracket as Auburn and Tennessee. Against Auburn in the Maui Invitational, the Cyclones suffered their lone defeat of the season. At Cameron Indoor Stadium, Duke is the only team to defeat the Tigers.
At the moment, Auburn is more concerned. In the first few minutes of Tuesday’s game against Georgia State, national player of the year candidate Johnni Broome hurt his shoulder. It is unclear if he will be able to play against Purdue on Saturday, but it was reported that surgery won’t be necessary to fix the injury. He is reportedly traveling to Birmingham, Alabama, with the team for Saturday’s game, and his return is anticipated sooner rather than later.
Here’s a little trivia for you at the end. Only the games played by Indiana have had double-digit scoring margins among the teams with wins and losses. Despite only suffering double-digit losses, Mississippi Valley State and Coppin State have yet to defeat D-I opponents.
January marks the start of the regular Monday and Friday bracket schedule. 3. .
