Western Kentucky’s bubble case is an interesting one. The Hilltoppers have one of the best wins in the country—a victory in Tuscaloosa over Alabama. They have a sweep of Marshall, an NIT-caliber team, to their credit. They’ve only lost four times, and two of those were to NCAA Tournament teams.
But they need more, especially if they don’t win the Conference USA tournament. Combining their median simulation with all the rest lands them as either the first or second team out of the field (depending on if you account for bid thief likelihood).
Enter Houston.
Houston’s also looking for a boost. The Cougars are projected, in our latest bracketology, to land as a 3-seed. Not bad, but not what a team KenPom rates the fifth-best in the country would want.
The two play tonight in a recently-scheduled game.
There’s upside and downside to this, but it’s different from the equation UNC calculated when it brought Marquette to town last night. In UNC’s case, missing the tournament was a legitimate fear. One more win would have meant a lot. One more loss would mean a lot more (as ended up being the case). For Houston and WKU, it’s a different deal. By scheduling an opponent as good as Houston, WKU offers themselves little downside, especially playing the Cougars on the road. A fifth Quadrant I game might help the Hilltoppers even if they lose it. If they win it, they might be able to afford a C-USA Tournament loss. For Houston, with WKU on the cusp of NET’s top 75, there’s a decent chance the win would go down as a second-quadrant one, and it will certainly help their SOS and nonconference SOS, which aren’t black eyes (and therefore probably aren’t too meaningful in Houston’s case) but could prove decisive if the committee comes down to a decision between Houston and Florida State or Villanova or Iowa or USC or Virginia for the final 2-seed. And if the Cougars lose? WKU will almost certainly jump into the top 75 in that case, making it a Quadrant II loss—disappointing, but not as harmful as…losing to Marquette.
***
For our model updates yesterday, we got the CAA to almost-finalized (“almost-finalized” is the designation we’re using when a conference’s schedule is locked into our model but one or more of tournament reseeding, tournament location, or tiebreakers within the standings is not locked in), while we finalized the Horizon League (so the only thing that could change the league’s picture in our model is a coronavirus or weather-related cancelation). The CAA is one of ten almost-finalized leagues, alongside the A-10, A-East, A-Sun, Big South, MVC, OVC, SoCon, Sun Belt, and WCC. The Horizon is the only finalized league. As we’ve been seeing, this doesn’t make a big impact on bracketology, but we want to be transparent about this, at least for those of you going to the trouble to read our stuff in addition to scanning our model’s outputs.
Our model, which relies heavily on KenPom for individual-game simulations and therefore conference tournament simulations, has the breakdown as follows for Horizon League champion probabilities:
Wright State: 68.4%
Cleveland State: 13.9%
Detroit Mercy: 6.3%
Northern Kentucky: 5.0%
Oakland: 3.3%
Youngstown State: 1.0%
Green Bay: 0.8%
Milwaukee: 0.6%
IUPUI: 0.4%
UIC: 0.2%
Purdue-Fort Wayne: 0.1%
Robert Morris: 0.1%
First round games are tonight on various campus locations. Wright State, Cleveland State, Northern Kentucky, and Oakland all have byes to the quarterfinals. As you can see, it’s Wright State’s tournament to lose, in roughly the same proportion as Yankees/Orioles games featuring the Orioles’ ace and the Yankees’ fourth starter are Yankees’ games to lose. Detroit Mercy, the 5-seed, is a popular sleeper in the blogosphere, and reseeding means there’s a decent chance they could find their way to Cleveland State’s side rather than Wright State’s side in the semifinals, but they’d be a heavy underdog against Wright State, and getting through even two games unscathed is a bit of a tossup.
Now, the bracketology movement today:
Moving Up: St. Bonaventure
The Bonnies hung on to beat Davidson down in Carolina yesterday evening despite scoring only five points over the game’s final ten minutes. It was a slow affair, with a heavy emphasis on three-point shooting (49 of the 102 field goal attempts were threes, with St. Bonaventure going 11-21 and Davidson going 8-28), so while it wasn’t pretty for the guests, it was effective. The road win helps. The hurdle dodged doesn’t hurt. And the A-10 leaders—SBU and VCU—now sit on the 7-line and the 8-line, respectively, in what’s shaping up to be a solid year for one of the true mid-major conferences.
Moving Down: Colorado, North Carolina
Colorado’s a bit of a surprise, since the Buffs haven’t played since Saturday, but they were passed by five teams as Rutgers’s win over Indiana shook up that middle seed portion of the rankings in KPI, SOR, and NET. The takeaway here, in addition to keeping an eye on Colorado’s safeness, is that the 7-9 seeds are on a razor’s edge. Colorado’s median finish in yesterday morning’s output was the 31st overall seed. In this morning’s output it was the 32nd overall seed. There are enough teams in that exact window that this sort of drop moved Ralphie’s guys two seed lines.
And then there’s UNC. We mentioned this above, but UNC lost a home game to Marquette that no one forced them to play. On the one hand, poor Roy Williams, this stinks, UNC tried to do something cool and it backfired. On the other hand, that was really funny, as long as you’re at least neutral on UNC.
The Tar Heels are still pretty safe—were there no coronavirus uncertainty, they’d be about 70% likely to make the field. But their margin for error is tight as they enter three straight relative tossups (FSU at home, Syracuse at Syracuse, Duke at home).
Moving In: UConn
Welcome back, Huskies! Our model doesn’t know the name “James Bouknight” but it does know that UConn was right there in line entering last night, and then this happened:
Moving Down: Xavier
Bad loss for the Musketeers. Not necessarily in quality—road losses are generally fine and Providence isn’t terrible—but in quantity (15 points is a lot) and context (that would’ve been one of Xavier’s best wins). They’re fine—they’re right on the bubble, still—but to state the painfully obvious, losing by fewer points (or winning!) would’ve been better.
***
Should update again tomorrow, hopefully with a few more conferences almost-finalized, and perhaps with the Big South and A-East finalized.
