I was hoping to get this post up yesterday, but life intervened in the form of a root canal and a tooth extraction, so college basketball took a backseat to Vicodin and doing nothing. The ranking landscape has changed since I last took a look at it, with the biggest story being Arizona picking up their first loss of the season at Cal. The data I’m using for comparison today are the consensus rankings from Bracket Matrix. I took the 41 rankings that were updated before yesterday’s games from Bracket Matrix and averaged those results. Feel free to mentally adjust Iowa St. and Oklahoma St. based on last night’s game. The rest is should all be valid. The teams are sorted in order of their rank at Bracket Matrix.
Arizona, Syracuse and Wichita St. all line up perfectly, with the only miss in the Bracket Matrix #1 seeds being Florida. While I’m not surprised that there’s disagreement among the top 4 teams, I am surprised that Florida is the team that’s causing it. EPW has them at #5, so it’s not outlandish, but they just aren’t the team I would expect to be there, especially with the way Lunardi has been touting Kansas. The only other thing of note from this graphic is that even though Arizona dropped behind Syracuse in the current rankings, they are still projected to finish in the top spot at season’s end.
I have documented my thoughts on Kansas before, so I’m not going to touch on that here. Villanova is slowly becoming the team I am most interested in reading about each morning. They’ve played a difficult schedule, only have two losses, yet don’t seem to be getting much discussion for a potential #1 seed. Of the 41 brackets that make up the consensus, only eight have the Wildcats on the top line. Maybe that will change if they can avenge the Creighton loss, but if that’s the only game they lose for the rest of the regular season, I believe they are in the driver’s seat for a #1 seed. I expect that I am in the minority with that opinion, but I stand by it.
The other big point coming from these four teams is San Diego St.’s Pyth rating. Right now, it is lower than the other projected #2 seeds. Looming as a potential 7-seed, both from Bracket Matrix and the EPW numbers, is Ohio St. The Buckeyes’ Pyth rating today: .897. Much higher than the other projected #7 seeds. While no #2 seed would be excited to play Ohio St. in the 2nd round, that match-up could be disastrous for SDST. Even if SDST has a Semi-Home game based on location of that game, KenPom sets the line at 1.5. This is a very specific scenario, but it’s the type of game that garners “SHOCKED” and “UPSET” headlines on ESPN after it happens.
The next few seeds all line up pretty well. I’ve already touched on Kentucky. They’re over-seeded with the Bracket Matrix numbers, as well. Oklahoma St. has a big disparity in the rankings, but that is mostly due to last night’s loss not being factored into their seedings. As always, here is the EPW Top 40. Louisiana Tech is only projected in 2 of the 41 consensus bracket’s, hence they’re rank of “X”.
