📄 2036 Dance Partners, Building a Better Bracket w/ EC Hood: Part 2 Feb 27th

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

There’s just one week left in the regular season, and it’s a very tough bracket to predict. The conference tournaments should produce even more havoc, meaning this will probably be the last “chalk” bracketology before things start going sideways in a couple of sims. Bid stealers are lurking everywhere.

Losses by Princeton, Coppin State and Evansville in their conference tournaments could spell doom for several teams on the bubble. But it’s a bit early for doom and gloom. For now, Coppin State gets a 7 seed and Princeton an 8, while Evansville is an 11 with a solid at-large resume.

Newcomers to the field three weeks later include Oregon, Arkansas and South Carolina. Georgia Southern has fallen into second place behind Southern Mississippi in the Sun Belt as well as the wrong side of the bubble. The Sun Belt looking like a one-bid league at the moment.

Baylor is a new No. 1 seed, pushing Minnesota down to a 2 in the Midwest, though it’s very close. Notre Dame has swapped seeding with Florida State and now sits as a 2 with a 25-5 record. Wichita State, at 23-4, is looking at a 3 seed right now thanks to a seven-game win streak.

It’s a huge final regular season week coming up! We’ll try to do a couple more of these before Selection Sunday.

The Rules:

1. No two teams from the same conference will play each other before the Elite 8 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 made it.
3. Note: Conference champion bid predictions are determined by the team with the best in-conference record, and higher NET ranking if tied, at the time of the update if the league title game hasn’t been played yet.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

IN GAME DATE: Feb 27th