Selection Sunday is just a month away…let’s predict the top 16 seeds ahead of Saturday’s reveal
The end of the college basketball regular season is just a month away with conference tournaments just around the corner. As a writer for a Tennessee blog, it’s impossible to look ahead because the present is never filled with a single day of rest with this school, but that’s what we’re going to do.
This will be an expanded version of Monday Morning Bracketology where we will examine teams that I believe will rise or fall the most from their current seed line in the bracket.
I will update this bracket every Monday and Friday morning after the large slates of games are finished.
So, let’s start with the up to date bracket:
Predicting the Top 16 Reveal
On Saturday, the bracket committee will reveal their in-season top 16 seeds, so let’s look at what our bracketology has laid out for us:
One Seeds
1:1 — Purdue | 1:2 — Houston | 1:3 — UConn | 1:4 — Arizona
- Purdue will be the top overall seed, and I’m not sure there should be too much deliberation about it. Both losses have been Q1 losses on the road to tournament teams, and they don’t have a loss outside of those games. They dominated Maui and have dominated the Big Ten.
- Houston, while the second overall seed, has the friskiest path forward. The Big XII is a gauntlet, and Houston has the biggest opportunity to slip up in comparison to UConn and Arizona.
- UConn just may be the best team in the country, and with Donovan Clingan back, they would be my personal pick. They boast the nation’s longest winning streak at 13, and six of those games have come on the road. They’re dominant, consistent, and most importantly for March, experienced.
- The Wildcats are the personification as to why scheduling and winning big non-conference games is paramount to March. The PAC-12 is easily the worst of the power-6 conferences and worse than the Mountain West overall, but Arizona’s wins over Duke at Cameron Indoor, Michigan State on a neutral floor, and Wisconsin at home has bolstered their résumé to a one-seed line…for now. Like Houston, this team is most susceptible to slipping up and falling off the one line, but for the opposite reason. Losses to PAC-12 teams are detrimental, and now that Utah has fallen off the bracket altogether with their drastic collapse, the conference is looking at potentially two teams making it.
Two Seeds
2:5 — Marquette | 2:6 — Tennessee | 2:7 — Iowa State | 2:8 — North Carolina
- Marquette and UConn have an ever-tightening stranglehold on the Big East. The two teams have combined to lose just two games in the new year, and an impending clash at UConn this Saturday could have drastic bracket implications for the Eagles if they can win.
- Tennessee is the safest bet as a riser to the one line of this group. They will finish the regular season with five straight games against near tournament locks, three of them being at home (Auburn, Kentucky, Texas A&M) with Alabama and South Carolina on the road.
- Iowa State just keeps winning. With big road wins over TCU, Texas, and Cincinnati over the past month, TJ Otzelberger has his best team since taking over in Ames. Keshon Gilbert and Tamin Lipsey are do-everything guards who anchor this team on both ends, and if you have reliable guard play in March, good things tend to happen.
- North Carolina was cruising for a one-seed line, but despite wins over Duke and Miami recently, they’re sandwiched between losses at Georgia Tech who is 2-12 over their last 14 games, Clemson at home, and at Syracuse. You can’t be dropping games to non-tournament teams this late in the regular season, and in the ACC, the slip-ups are bear traps.
Three Seeds
3:9 — Baylor | 3:10 — Kansas | 3:11 — Alabama | 3:12 — Wisconsin
- Baylor is weird. They’re a better version of Kentucky with less talent overall. The Bears lead the nation in 3-point percentage at a blistering 41.2% clip, but defensively, they struggle to string together stops. Yves Missi is a legit rim protector, but they just don’t make teams uncomfortable on the perimeter like we’ve seen them do in year’s past.
- Kansas is the team with arguably the most talent in the nation, and while they’re a top 10 seed, the country is just waiting for them to actually play like that kind of team. Hunter Dickinson has been good, not great, in conference play, and that goes for Kevin McCullar as well. Two players this team is reliant upon to produce, and they’ve been hit or miss for efficient nights for the better part of the last month. That will have to change for a deep run in March.
- I’ve spoken a lot about my lack of trust in Alabama, but credit to Nate Oats, they keep winning the games they’re supposed to win. It’s just those games against good teams that they keep losing that creates my lack of trust in this team. They split their games against Auburn but looked horrible on the road, losing by 18, and Tennessee completely outmatched them on both ends of the floor, losing to the Vols by 20. In fact, their home win over Auburn is the only top 10 (KenPom) win the Tide have against anyone this season. Be wary of Alabama.
- Wisconsin has fallen from the second two-seed to the last three-seed, hanging on by a thread, over the past two weeks. With losses at Nebraska, Michigan, and Rutgers, two of which just can’t happen, Wisconsin’s likelihood of climbing back to a two-seed are slim.
Four Seeds
4:13 — Auburn | 4:14 — Duke | 4:15 — San Diego State | 4:16 — Creighton
- Auburn has gone from undesirable to undeniable in my eyes this season. I had conditioned myself to never trust their guards, so naturally, Johni Broome and Jaylin Williams said not to think of guards when you think of Auburn. Broome has blossomed into one of the best players in the country while Williams continues to be one of the most efficient all-around scorers in the nation and best players in the SEC. Through these two players, Auburn has officially earned my trust.
- Similar to Kansas, Duke feels like the team we’re all waiting for to break out, and they just insist on sitting in cruise control as a perfectly good team with a top gear better than anyone else’s in the nation that they refuse to hit. If they can avoid the traps with a trio of road games in a row against Florida State, Miami, and Wake Forest, I’ll start to look at Duke more closely as a potential two-seed. Until then, they’re on the back burner.
- If Creighton forced more turnovers, I think we’d be looking at a 20-5 team on the cusp of a two-seed line. The Bluejays are 362nd in turnover rate against in the nation with just a 5.2% steal rate, the worst of any power conference team in the tournament bracket as it stands.