📄 2034 Dance Partners, Building a Better Bracket w/ EC Hood: Part 1 Mar 11th

Dance Partners, Building a Better Bracket. A bracketology presentation by EC Hood

For college hoops heads, Draft Day Sports provides an incredible simulation that takes us on a rollercoaster ride through all facets of a season, off-season and career. Unfortunately, an often-disappointing element of this otherwise excellent game is Selection Sunday, the highlight of the college basketball calendar in real life. Conference opponents playing against each other in the early rounds is one of the more common frustrations encountered. For this exercise, we will try to remedy this by channeling the real-world NCAA committee and picking the full field of 68 with matchups.

The Rules:

1. No two teams from the same conference will play each other before the Sweet 16 unless impossible to avoid.
2. No at-large teams will be seeded below the 12 line unless impossible to avoid. The play-in at-large teams will always be the last four at-large teams that make it.
3. I will tend to give an edge to power conference teams in seeding. This is a personal preference that has more to do with thinking the NET rankings in the game overpower smaller schools and mid majors than anything else.
4. This is not a prediction of what the actual bracket will end up being in the game. It is a prediction of what the bracket would be if this season occurred in real life right now and was picked by the NCAA committee.
5. I’m not quite the NCAA committee – I’m not going to examine every injury to determine if a result was legit or not and I probably won’t have time to drill down into every team sheet. In the end, this is just for fun.

Keep in mind, this was put together before the conference tournament results came in for Saturday and Sunday. Let’s take a look at the bracket!

IN GAME DATE: March 11th