Bracketology: Surging Alabama rises to second position in the new NCAA tournament bracket projection

A new key is released and Alabama continues its rise on the chart. Crimson Tide, who moved up to second in Friday’s bracket projection, is undefeated in the SEC and has won 10 consecutive wins overall. These wins include games in Tennessee and LSU and they will travel to Oklahoma to face another hot team at Sooners on Saturday as part of the SEC / Big 12 Challenge. OU has won four consecutive games, the last two of which were against Kansas at home and in Texas.

Here are some other key lessons from this week:

Number of games played is not the same

One of the things that is different this season when trying to make the projected keys is to compare teams that have played a very different number of games. Saint Louis just played their first game in about a month this week, and the Billikens showed some rust in their 76-71 home loss to Dayton. This is only the ninth game they play and only the second defeat. I’m trying to compare them with teams like Louisville, which played 14 games, or Colorado, which has 16 games on their resume. Even Rutgers is in that part of the key and the Scarlet Knights played as many Quad 1 games as Saint Louis played in total.

However, there is still a little more than six weeks to go until Selection Sunday, so although there are disparities in the number of games played, the expectation is that there will be enough to judge each team fairly.

Teams showing rust after rest

Speaking of teams that are taking long breaks from COVID, we are finding that the results are mixed. The expectation is that the teams will show some rust after a long period of rest, and some certainly are, but not all.

Villanova, for example, came off a break of almost a month with victories over Seton Hall and Providence. Georgia Tech took a break for more than two weeks with a victory bursting over Clemson. This was the Tigers’ second game in a relatively short interval, but they were defeated in three straight games before recovering with a victory over Louisville on Wednesday.

Michigan State, which has not been in my range since preseason, lost 30 at Rutgers on Thursday night in his first game in three weeks.

I imagine that the selection committee can take the results into account after a long pause, but in the end the victories are victories and the defeats are defeats.

Will teams not participate in the conference tournaments?

Another thing that the committee may have to deal with and that it has not had to do before is the possibility of teams that perceive themselves blocked for general moves to opt out of their conference tournament.

This could put the committee in an uncomfortable position to decide whether the winner of a diluted conference tournament would be an automatic classifier. The committee has always left the decision of the automatic qualifier for conferences in the past.

It is also said that some conferences can simply cancel their tournaments and declare the champion of the regular season as the winner. These decisions need not be made yet.

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