I don’t want to say that we are off to a chaotic start to the season, but none of the teams I had projected as No. 1 seeds in my preseason bracket are among the top seeds in Friday’s bracket — the first update since the start of the season.
Baylor is back where the Bears finished off last season – at No. 1. The Bears have earned the top spot in the bracket, followed by Duke, Alabama and Iowa State. The undefeated Cyclones are coming off of a 20-point mauling of in-state rival on Thursday night at the Hilton Coliseum. ISU also has wins over Xavier, Memphis and Creighton, all away from home.
Purdue would have been the overall No. 1, but they lost at Rutgers on Thursday. That loss was bad enough to knock the Boilermakers are back to the No. 2-line, where they started the season. Gonzaga, with its two losses, Kansas and Villanova round out the group of No. 2 seeds.
Bracketology top seeds
Check out Palm’s latest bracket, full field of 68 and all the teams on the bubble on the Bracketology hub.
A Quad 4 quagmire
One of the challenges of doing brackets before conference season starts is that many of the majors have loaded up on Quadrant 4 games, so they have gaudy records with little to no accomplishment.
Take Kentucky, for example. Since starting the season with a loss against Duke, the Wildcats have played seven Quad 4 games and one from Quad 3, all at home. They have basically taken the first month of the season off and are the first team out of the bracket. All we know about the Wildcats is that they are better than Ohio if they play the Bobacts at Rupp Arena and not as good as Duke on a neutral floor. We should know more than that about teams by now.
Texas, a No. 11 seed, is not much better, but the Longhorns have played two good teams, losing to both. The line between in and out in this bracket goes right between Texas and Kentucky. I would be shocked if the final bracket did not have each of those teams among the top 25 seeds, but they have done nothing to earn that yet.
NET not very helpful
Also complicating December brackets is the fact that the NET is not very reliable yet and probably will not be for about another month.
For example, 8-1 Wyoming is No. 22 in Friday’s NET rankings and I am seeing a lot of “WYOMING IS THIS YEAR’S COLGATE!” Wyoming is not this year’s Colgate. Nobody will be this year’s Colgate. There will be anomalies in the rankings, like there are every year, and that is especially true in early December.
However, Colgate was a top 20 team in the NET all of last season because of the fact that it played no non-conference games due to the pandemic. The Raiders ranking was not just an anomaly, it was irrelevant. The Patriot League excluded itself from the rest of Division I, even if the NET did not exclude the conference. Nobody will have a schedule like that this season. If Wyoming finishes this season in the top 20 of the NET, the Cowboys will likely have earned it.
This and that
- Also, remember when this was going to be the year that Memphis finally makes a run? That may still happen but at the moment, the Tigers are a hot mess again. There is still plenty of talent on the roster and time to fix their problems, but they are out of the bracket for now.
- There have also been a widely disparate number of games played by each team. UC Irvine is in the bracket as an automatic qualifier, but has only played four D-I games. How do you compare them to a team like Oakland, which has played ten, or Belmont, which has 11 games in the books? Not easily.
- As I have always done, I determine the “automatic qualifier” for a conference by taking the team with the fewest conference losses and breaking ties with the NET. Since most conferences have yet to begin conference play, most teams still have zero conference losses.
- Finally, every team that is currently undefeated found its way into the bracket.
