Reader…I know. I said there would be a Wake Forest column last Thursday. But Thursday came and went, and there was no column in sight. You were hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok, and flat-out deceived by me. And for that I must apologize. I am deeply sorry. Please accept this excerpt of the 1200-word (and still far from complete) draft that will never see the light of day as a token of my regret:
Wake Forest fans are hungry to return to the NCAA tournament. The glory days of the 1990s and the early 2000s––fifteen consecutive winning seasons, Rodney Rogers, Randolph Childress, Josh Howard, and– oh yes– Tim Duncan and Chris Paul––have long since faded in Forsyth County. Kentucky routed the Demon Deacons in the second round of the 2010 tournament, head coach Dino Gaudio was promptly let go, and the drought commenced. One very brief trip to the Big Dance in the last 13 years, a defeat in the First Four in 2017.
A sad trajectory, but if you’re a Wake Forest fan, I hope reading the names Rodney Rogers, Randolph Childress, and Josh Howard brightened your day.
But I digress. No more overpromising! For the remainder of the season, I will stick to the time-honored tradition of quick hits. Perhaps I will return to writing columns when I am no longer in law school, which, in case I haven’t mentioned yet, is extremely time-consuming! Ten weeks to graduation. Twelve days to Selection Sunday. What a time to be alive.
And what a time to read some disclaimers, which are slightly modified for conference tournament season!
The Usual Disclaimers
- Projections attempt to simulate what the selection committee would do given what we know about each team. This is not my opinion of the teams, this is my prediction of the committee’s opinion.
- This bracketology is a snapshot, frozen in time. It does not aim to predict what will happen; it is a simulation of what would happen if the season ended today.
- Conference champions are determined by whoever has the fewest losses in conference play, with NET used as a tiebreaker. Exceptions will be made for the top seed of a conference tournament in which all games are played on campus sites (Central Connecticut State, it’s your lucky day)
- Projections made based on NET data entering Monday but win-loss records entering Tuesday
Quick Hits
- Please feel free to @ me on Twitter with any comments, questions, concerns. Seriously, I welcome even the most obscure questions
- Alabama is still a 3-seed. It’s incredibly tempting to put Creighton above the Crimson Tide, but ‘Bama’s resume is deceptively strong. Alabama’s quad 1 and quad 2 games are clustered near the top halves of those quadrants, whereas Creighton’s are clustered near the bottom halves. The committee was surprisingly high on Alabama in the top 16 preview, and I don’t see that changing.
- (Update 3/5 9:27 PM ET: Alabama is no longer a 3-seed. Yikes.)
- Oh, to think how much time I could have saved writing that Wake Forest column had I just written “please win another game in a facility that isn’t The Joel.” Your NET will only carry you so far.
- Speaking of which, New Mexico gets the last spot by virtue of its NET and its NET alone. If you’re in the top 29 in NET, I will put you in the tournament, no questions asked. I will explain my reasoning for this another day.
- Keep an eye on Iowa and Drake, a couple of bubble teams flying under the radar
- Every single 12 seed has an extremely strong case for the last 11-seed, which I have tentatively awarded to South Florida
Seed List
1 1 Purdue
2 1 UConn
3 1 Houston
4 1 Arizona
5 2 North Carolina
6 2 Tennessee
7 2 Marquette
8 2 Kansas
9 3 Baylor
10 3 Iowa State
11 3 Alabama
12 3 Duke
13 4 Creighton
14 4 Auburn
15 4 Illinois
16 4 Kentucky
17 5 BYU
18 5 San Diego State
19 5 Clemson
20 5 South Carolina
21 6 Washington State
22 6 Dayton
23 6 Wisconsin
24 6 Utah State
25 7 Boise State
26 7 Saint Mary’s
27 7 Gonzaga
28 7 Texas
29 8 Colorado State
30 8 Texas Tech
31 8 Florida
32 8 Mississippi State
33 9 Northwestern
34 9 Nevada
35 9 TCU
36 9 Oklahoma
37 10 Nebraska
38 10 Michigan State
39 10 Florida Atlantic
40 10 Villanova
41 11A Virginia
42 11A Seton Hall
43 11B St. John’s
44 11 Indiana State
45 11B New Mexico
46 11 South Florida
47 12 Richmond
48 12 Grand Canyon
49 12 Princeton
50 12 McNeese
51 13 Appalachian State
52 13 Samford
53 13 UC Irvine
54 13 Louisiana Tech
55 14 Akron
56 14 Vermont
57 14 Col. of Charleston
58 14 High Point
59 15 Oakland
60 15 Morehead State
61 15 Colgate
62 15 Eastern Washington
63 16 South Dakota State
64 16 Quinnipiac
65 16A Norfolk State
66 16A Central Conn. State
67 16B Eastern Kentucky
68 16B Grambling State
Teams on Standby
(In order from first team out to 18th team out)
Providence
Utah
Colorado
Wake Forest
Iowa
Drake
James Madison
Texas A&M
Ohio State
Butler
Kansas State
Pitt
Cincinnati
Ole Miss
Virginia Tech
Memphis
Syracuse
Minnesota
Jake Liker's Bracketology 