Brad’s Bubble Analysis- March 12th
Posted by deaconcat08 on March 12, 2010
I’ll be posting my latest bracketology later tonight, but I just wanted to give a quick summary of the bubble situation at this point in time. Basically, there are, in my opinion, 8 teams fighting for 4 spots. Those teams in order of their current seeding are: Florida, Illinois, Ole Miss, Washington, Mississippi State, Rhode Island, Dayton, and Minnesota. Interestingly enough, all 8 teams are still playing basketball in their conference tourneys as of 3:00 today; thus, they all have a chance to get big wins that will put them in the field. Florida and Mississippi State play each other tonight at 7:00 in which could be a de facto NCAA play-in game. Ole Miss, Illinois, and Dayton are all underdogs to tourney teams today, so if they can win, their stock will be increase greatly. Rhode Island plays Saint Louis and will likely need to win that one and beat Temple to have a real chance at an at-large bid. Minnesota is the real longshot of the group as they will probably need to make it to the Big 10 final by getting wins over Michigan State and most likely Purdue.
Keep in mind that some of these bids could get stolen by surprising conference champions. The best candidates for this are in the C-USA and the WAC where the top seeds are the only tourney teams in the field (UTEP, Utah State.) If either of those two were to lose, then they would still probably get a bid and knockdown one of the bubble teams into the NIT. Furthermore, the SEC, Big 10, ACC. Mountain West, Atlantic 10, Pac-10 and Big 12 have longshot non-tourney teams who could also steal some bids. Hope this all makes sense, and let the bubble fun begin!