Joe Lunardi updated ESPN’s bracketology on Tuesday, and as we’ve said before, we like his offseason bracketology a lot. It’s useful. I believe I’ve seen him say before that he uses a model to evaluate each roster, at least as a starting point, and even if he doesn’t, he’s at least looking at this stuff in detail and keeping the teams lined up, which makes this at least as good as anything else out there.
At the moment, he has Gonzaga as the number one seed.
And he’s not alone. It appears futures markets also have the Zags as the championship favorites.
It’s a reasonable stance. Gonzaga was either the best team in college basketball over the course of this year or narrowly the second-best (so long as you base your impressions off a season rather than a single game), and despite losing a large share of production to the NBA, they’re so stacked with four and five-star talent (some of those extremely early 2022 NBA mock drafts have more Zags being picked than are expected to go in this summer’s draft) that the assumption is that they will be back with comparable force.
That’s a fair assumption annually at this point. For the last five years, Gonzaga’s been a perennial 1-seed, with the exceptions of 2018, when they were a 4-seed and lost in the Sweet Sixteen, and 2020, when they were expected to be a 1-seed prior to the tournament’s cancelation. Gonzaga is arguably the best college basketball program out there right now, and if betting on which program will win a title within the next five years or ten years, the smart money would probably again be on Gonzaga. They have so much talent. So, so much talent. And they keep getting more of it.
Is their environment also supportive of this cause? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, playing in the West Coast Conference minimizes the probability of them putting together a string of too many overall losses, something we occasionally see out of teams in leagues like the Big Ten and Big 12, even if no single loss is unpalatable. Saint Mary’s and BYU aren’t expected to be particularly strong next year—Lunardi has each right around the bubble—so there’s no clear duel in which two or three games are particularly likely to break the way of Mark Few’s foes. There’s a risk as a mid-major of not amassing enough good wins and finding yourself punished by the committee for being a mid-major, as Gonzaga itself can attest to after 2016 saw them relegated to an 11-seed, only to stomp on Seton Hall and Utah on the old-fashioned route to the Sweet Sixteen (to be clear, there can also be a benefit to being a mid-major and posting a great W-L against weak competition, but that often still leaves you short). But with Duke, Texas Tech, Texas, and two of the three of Louisville, Oklahoma State, and Providence on the schedule, most of that risk is mitigated. Going back to Lunardi’s bracket, that’s seven or eight games against tournament teams on the schedule already, with I believe six nonconference spots remaining to be filled.
It’s hard to be all that big a favorite for anything this far in advance, and it’s hard in college basketball especially, in which the championship is decided by crapshoot, but as far as NCAA Tournament favorites go, Gonzaga is a decently clear one given how far out we are.
