Let’s get this discussion started with my obviously biased and possibly delusional prediction: Florida State wins the tournament after beating Duke in the Championship game. Final score: FSU 78 Duke 74.
Biggest 1st round upsets will be VCU over Wichita State & Xavier over Notre Dame.
Ohio State got out of Kentucky’s bracket, which was nice (let Duke deal with Baylor in the Sweet 16), but still has to play Gonzaga in round 2. It’s all going to come down to their outside shooting. When William Buford is on they’re damn near unbeatable, but when he struggles so do they. Assuming he has a good tournament, I expect the Buckeyes to get to the Final Four.
Harvard over Vandy?
Marquette, behind Big East Player of the Year Jae Crowder and DJO will win the West.
I hope.
My team is Gonzaga, they got a 7 seed, way better than the dreaded 8/9. They play West Virginia in the East bracket. It will be tough to beat WV but it gives them Ohio St in the second round as the 2 seed and I would rather play Ohio St then any of the other 2 seeds.
The biggest problem is that there games are basically road games, potentially playing both WV and Ohio St in Pittsburg.
I’ll take Kentucky vs. North Carolina in the final. I’m taking North Carolina 74 - 68
Upsets: I have Cal (after the play in) over Temple and Montana
Copied from the ACC thread re: FSU v OSU in the Sweet 16: Don’t see why not. We match up well physically. FSU almost always plays a stifling defense and when our shooters also get hot…
Overall, we’re now an experienced Tourney team - our 6 seniors have 20 years of Tourney play collectively and they seem to have finally gotten past some of the early season bullshit. This should be a Sweet 16 for sure, an Elite 8 as an attainable goal, and a Final Four as a realistic stretch goal. After that, it’s in the hands of the Hoops Gods. A couple of breaks and who knows.
Sorry for the double post: Net timed out…
Anybody have any good recs for an Excel-based Pool Manager? I used to use the one from WhenTheWhistleBlows.com, but he appears to have disappeared. For a variety of reasons, I can’t use an on-line one unless it allows the pool manager to input other people’s sheets for them. If it’s relevant the pool usually has 40-50 entries.
I think this could be Kentucky’s year. 'Course I’m a liiiitttle bit biased since I was raised there – that said, we haven’t won since 1998 and the natives are getting restless. Now that we’ve gotten rid of the blight that was Tubby Smith and Calipari has had a year to work out the kinks, I expect us to at least make it to the Final Four. I am fervently hoping that KY getting beat today will wake 'em up.
One team I’d encourage you to seriously check out as you fill out your brackets: Murray State. They are HOT this year and I think they are going to bust a lot of brackets because most people are going to shrug them off as a no-name school that got there by dumb luck. Will they go all the way? Probably not … but I definitely don’t see them going anywhere after the first or second round as they’ve done in the past – especially if they keep their heads and keep doing what they’ve been doing all season.
Full disclosure - I started college at MSU and I have family that graduated from there. So I might be a little bit biased here too …
… but not by much. Two years ago, they damn near beat Butler, who went on to the championship game (admittedly, they lost, but Butler was indeed incredible that year) – this would be after they took out #4 Vandy. Most of that team is still around, juniors and seniors now. They’ve had all of 1 loss the entire season.
Know what? This articlesums it up better than I can. (At the time it was written they were still undefeated.)
At my office we did an ACC Tourney pool and Florida State was predicted by only 1 person; most of us thought UNC would take it. They’ve surprised me the past couple of days, but I’m still not wildly impressed. They almost handed Duke the game yesterday and barely won today – they don’t suck by any means, and a win is a win, but I haven’t seen them actually kick ass yet. (There is a difference between kicking ass and clawing for the win.) I don’t see 'em going all the way … nor do I see Puke in the Final Four despite their #2 seed. Oy I’d love to see Lehigh pull an upset and send those !&#^@ back to Durham with their tails between their legs!
As an NC State alum, it’s good to be back in the dance after many years out. The Selection Show really frayed our last nerves, though, waiting until the end to announce that we made it.
I think we can definitely get past SDSU in the first round (err, sorry, the second round), and have a good shot at making the S16. Don’t see us taking down Kansas, though.
Well it’s been a long time since Michigan was in as anything other than dead money, I thought they deserved a 3rd seed, but ohh well.
They way they shoot 3’s, at their best they can beat anyone, but they have some real shittty days too.
The thing about Murray is that they will almost certainly win their first game (against Colorado State), but then they’re likely to face Marquette, since I just don’t see the Golden Eagles losing to either Iona or BYU. I’ll grant you that the Racers are a solid team (30-1 after all), but Marquette is a quality opponent.
More importantly, is anyone here in SDMB going to make a bracket contest like the other years?
Harvard, who’s in the tournament for the first time since 1946, will go all the way!
No, not really, but it’s hilarious to trash-talk about it.
… to the end of the first round!
What a surprise, Duke gets to play the first two rounds in its home state. Just like they do every other year. Maybe when the announcers go “oooh golly golly oooh gush gush” over Coach K’s number of Final Four appearances they might mention that it’s a little easier when he gets a free ride to the sweet 16 every freaking year.
As usual, good luck to all the Big Ten teams. Especially Michigan State.
Yup.
Go big blue!!!
I’ve also got one started here.
It should be noted, though, that the crowd will be against them in their second game. Carolina is in the same pod, and there will be considerably more heels fans than duke fans in the arena on Sunday.
Coach K has basically said he’d rather play away from home than play in the same pod as UNC.
I wonder how many years it will take for the NCAA to go back to calling the round of 64 the first round, the way it went back to naming regions by area names (West, Midwest, East, South) instead of the regional final cities.
I noticed a few strange things about the brackets, once they announced the “true” (1-68) seedings of all of the teams:
[ul]
[li]The two “best” at-large teams that have to play (choose one: “first four”, “first round”, “play-in”) games play each other for a 12 seed, and the two “worst” play each other for a 14, rather than 1 playing 4 and 2 playing 3; the same is done with the four conference champions that have to play their way into the round of 64[/li]
[li]California and Southern Florida are seeded higher than BYU, but BYU got the “bye” into the second round ahead of them; “the version I heard was,” it was because the “first four” winners have to play on Friday and (if they win) Sunday, but the NCAA will not force BYU to play on a Sunday against its wishes (then again, it does the Cal-USF winner’s conference a favor as it gets something like an extra $1 million per season over the next six seasons)[/li]
[li]The regions are supposed to be balanced in that the sum of the true seeds of the top four teams in a region is not supposed to be more than five away from the seeds in any other region, but the South’s total (1, 6, 9, 15) is 7 different from the West’s (4, 8, 10, 16)[/li]
[li]The “worst” #1, #2, and #4 seeds are all in the west region, but that isn’t particularly surprising as, within each seed number, the teams are supposed to be placed in regions in order from best to worst, and the best teams actually in the west region are 5 seeds, so the “leftover” teams in each number get sent out west (and probably the only reason Marquette was sent west instead of Georgetown was to prevent a really serious bracket imbalance)[/li][/ul]
Syracuse center Fab Melo declared ineligible for the tournament.
Adjust your brackets accordingly.