There is only one day until Selection Sunday and the key starts to take shape. There are still 26 games left, 20 of which will decide the automatic qualifiers.
This is assuming that we can play all of these games, which has not happened in the past few days. On Friday, Virginia and Kansas had to drop out of their respective conference tournaments due to players with a positive result for COVID-19. It is not yet known whether these teams will have to give up on the NCAA Tournament as well, but Kansas has indicated that it expects to travel to Indianapolis on Monday without those who have tested positive, while the situation in Virginia is less clear.
There is a 23:59 ET deadline on Saturday to inform the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee if a team needs to withdraw before the key announcement on Sunday. If a team has to withdraw after that, but before 6 pm Eastern time on Tuesday, it will be replaced by one of the first four teams outside the committee’s key.
In my brace today, Oklahoma State moved up to a 2-seed after defeating Baylor 83-74 in the solitary Big 12 semifinal game. The Cowboys won eight out of nine, while winning the key for a month. This is the ceiling for them, however. Oklahoma will face Texas – which advanced after Kansas was forced to withdraw from the tournament – for the title of the top 12 tonight
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Georgia Tech also received a pass to the tournament final with the Yellow Jackets moving up when Virginia had to withdraw from the ACC tournament on Friday morning. They will play against Florida State, which beat North Carolina in the semifinals
It has been an especially bad year for the first seeds in conference tournaments. Of the 31 tournaments, only seven seeded winners have won and 10 more still have a chance. Of the 14 that were eliminated, 12 teams lost, while Virginia and North Carolina A&T had to give up due to positive COVID tests. None of the 16 seeds in my key were the main ones in their conference tournaments.
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At the bottom of the bracket, Utah State advanced with a victory over Colorado State in the semifinals of Mountain West. Saint Louis gave up.
The teams in the bottom four of the list will be rooting for Colorado and Creighton on Saturday. Oregon State and Georgetown will dispute the conference titles at Pac-12 and Big East, respectively. If either team wins, a bid will be stolen from the bottom of the key. People usually think that bidding thieves come from unimportant conferences, but that can also happen at large ones.
People often ask what is the most difficult thing to do bracket projections in a season affected by COVID. It is the disparate number of games that the teams participated. For example, this morning I was comparing Wichita State, which played 18 games, to North Carolina, which has 18 wins … and 10 losses. The committee can only judge teams by what they have done with the opportunities they have had, but comparisons like this are difficult.