It’s fun to call things odysseys. I’ve been on a calling-things-odysseys kick lately. Long Uber ride? Call it an odyssey (but only if there are a lot of turns—highway trips aren’t odysseys unless you go past the suburbs). Long night out at the local establishments? Call it an odyssey (but only if a lot of things happen—sitting in one booth all night cracking wise doesn’t count). Long battle to cook the soup? Call it an odyssey (but partially because of the tremendous emotions surrounding whether or not you’ll burn the frozen green beans again).
The Sun Belt Tournament, like all these other things, is an odyssey. It lasts for-freaking-ever. You can never remember which nights, exactly, the rounds take place. It’s played in tons of towns that are hard to get to because the only big airports in the South are in Texas, Florida, Atlanta, and Charlotte. And, as you would hope an odyssey would, it ends in New Orleans.
The story here, besides the fact the tournament’s a bona fide odyssey, is Arkansas-Little Rock. You may see them called just “Little Rock.” You may see them called UALR. You might not hear about them at all. Next weekend’s kind of busy for college hoops.
Because the Sun Belt uses a double stepladder, and lets ten teams in, and has home court games for the first three rounds, Little Rock gets only two chances to skip itself on into the waters of the NIT. Even so, they have one of the highest NIT probabilities of any team out there, because Little Rock’s only pretty good and Texas State’s also pretty good and Georgia State and Georgia Southern and UT-Arlington are pretty good too and South Alabama’s won a lot of conference games. In other words, there are a lot of teams capable of knocking off the Little Rock (though none have achieved enough to hold NIT aspirations of their own).
UALR’s a fun team to look at in the daily iterations of our NIT Bracketology because they’re always playing a geographic neighbor. Memphis. Mississippi State. St. Louis. Arkansas(-Fayetteville). It’s easy for our model to find these guys nearby teams to play, and when playing nearby teams (actually probably just Arkansas), we expect there to be a little more emotion involved. Kind of a Wichita State/Kansas feel, except on a much bigger stage.
Still, we must reckon with the fact that UALR is no NIT lock. Nobody is. That’s part of the joy of the NIT. And that, along with the fact we aren’t going to see them play until next Saturday, is why we encourage you to wait before buying yourself that “Little Rock ‘n’ Roll” shirt I see you eying in the next tab over. They might be a Cinderella. But for now, they’re just cleaning the fireplace (now that’s an odyssey).
