So, I need to have something in the case that the NCAA reverses course and releases a bracket.  But here is the thing – since there is not going to be a tournament, I don’t have as much of a desire to sift through team sheets to rank the teams.  What I really want to do is use the next three weeks that I would have poured my heart and soul into college basketball, and spend it to see if I can improve some of my processes.

What if I can come up with an analytical process to simulate the selection committee process?  What if I can clean up my datapull codes so that I don’t have to copy and paste 30 Oral Roberts box scores into my dataset?   What if I can finally build a model to predict the games?  What if I can actually get decent night’s sleep during March? What if I can actually play games with my kids while we are all forced to lock ourselves in our houses to wait for the virus to disappear?  There seem to be so many ways to do this without needing to rush.

Unless of course they announce the bracket today.  Then, I will be sad.  So, I am going to do an extremely lazy job of this – so that I can get a bracket done in the next hour or two.  And then, will continue to refine my rules.

We already locked our pool.  Now, we have to look at the bubble.  I have to still figure out 19 bubble teams.  The easy way to do this is set some logic rules and be done.  For example, I can widdle the field in a couple ways – first, the committee has never selected a team worst than 82nd in the rankings (to my knowledge) – and that team was a small conference school that was ranked in the polls that the RPI just didn’t like.  If you are not in the top 80 of the NET, you are out.  I can also widdle things down by removing teams with less than a .533 winning percentage (according to CBS Jerry Palm – that is the worse record to get an at-large bid).   Sorry, Boilermakers – but you are out.  Surprisingly, this didn’t happen as much as in past years, but you can also remove teams that have 0 Quadrant 1 victories – if you didn’t beat at least someone in the top part of the league, you don’t get in.

But there are still a bunch of teams left.  It seems to me that you should be able to take any major conference team with a conference record that is 3 games over 500.  With so many bubble teams at 9-9 or 10-10 in conference, it seems like a 11-7 team in the same conference should be in.  Welcome to the bracket…..

• LSU
• USC
• Arizona State
• Florida
• Arizona
• Providence
• Mississippi State
• UCLA

Of those teams, the one that worries me is Mississippi State – they only have 2 quadrant 1 wins….  But hey – rules are rules……

Next, the committee tends to give only 4-5 spots to mid-majors, tending to be the best available from each of the conferences that have multiple teams under consideration.   This includes typically a surprise like Temple.  But it also last year had the surprise of Belmont – they rewarded a regular-season champ who lost in their conference tournament.   If I do that for 2020, those teams are:

• Wichita State (American) – in my mind, they had a slightly better profile than Memphis or Tulsa
• Richmond (Atlantic 10) – clearly the best team in the A-10 behind Dayton
• St. Mary’s CA (WCC) – their victory in the WCC tourney over BYU probably was enough
• Northern Iowa (MVC) – the regular season champ who lost their conference tournament

I am a little worried about Northern Iowa – numerically speaking, their profile looks almost identical to Belmont.  But their is one big difference.  Belmont lost to Murray State in their tournament – a team that was also under consideration in 2019.  Northern Iowa lost to Drake, and was actually stumbling their way to the end of the season.  If the tournament was going on, I guarantee this weekend would be a tough weekend for Northern Iowa as they wait to see if their win against Colorado was enough.  But still – rules are rules……

OK – now down to 7 left.  If these all go to the major conferences, I can simply rank those teams by conference and then bring some teams in.  This gives me the following remaining teams:

• Penn State
• Michigan
• Oklahoma
• Marquette
• Rutgers
• Colorado
• Texas Tech

So – I think the Big 10 three are the safest because of all the hype around how strong the conference is.  Oklahoma also feels good based on how they finished the season.  Marquette makes me a little nervous – but they have a top 30 NET ranking – this tends to be a guarantee for a major conference bubble team.  Colorado and Texas Tech also make me a little nervous because they really stumbled down the stretch.  They are in because they were both ranked in the polls until the last few weeks when they started their losing streaks.

This leaves the following teams currently on the outside looking in.  Each of them have some reasons why they could claim they should be in, but also clearly have enough issues that they aren’t in….

I think if I had to rank them – first four out:

• North Carolina State – they seem to be the best of the 11-10 ACC teams if you count their ACC tournament opening round win).
• Indiana – they certainly have some great victories, but 9-11 and being swept by a Purdue team that was eliminated from the bubble might have them on the outside looking in
• Arkansas – this one is the one I am actually most unsure of – if the committee considers the injury, this is another story.  But the numbers without that show an 8-11 SEC team.  Not having the quarterfinals of the SEC tournament impacts this team the hardest – they really needed one more big win.
• Stanford – highest NET team left on the bubble (33) but 9-10 in the Pac 12 thanks to the early exit in the first round of the Pac 12 tournament probably isn’t enough.

Others that were left that didn’t fail one of my other rules (in order by NET ranking):

• Xavier
• Notre Dame
• Rhode Island
• Memphis
• Tennessee
• Oklahoma State
• South Carolina
• Texas

So – there you go, now to see if I can quickly rank my 68 teams so that I can play with analytics or simply relax the rest of the afternoon…….