Sunday, January 07, 2007

The march to, uh, March

It's time to start seeding the top 16 men's teams. If I were ranking teams in a poll, Clemson would be at the top, by virtue of being the only remaining undefeated team. (Ranking anyone else #1 would be stupid.) To seed teams, however, you should also consider strength of schedule. Here's my first attempt:

San Jose Regional
1. UCLA: Understandable loss at Oregon doesn't change seed.
2. Kansas: Face tough home test Wednesday against OK State.
3. Nevada: Wolf Pack as a 3 seed? That is WAC.
4. Air Force: Careful; the Mountain West looks really good this year.

St. Louis Regional
1. Wisconsin: First of two matchups against Ohio State on Tuesday.
2. Butler: This year's GW? Nope. Better.
3. Arizona: Well, they haven't imploded yet.
4. Notre Dame: Best Big East team prior to conference play.

East Rutherford Regional
1. North Carolina: Does this team belong to Big Eyes or Big Ears?
2. Ohio State: Should we expect great things up at Kohl's?
3. LSU: Will they pay the price when Bama gets home?
4. Oregon: Can their talent finally produce in the Pac-10?

San Antonio Regional
1. Florida: Look really good. Mostly at home, but still.
2. Clemson: Not just winning, but winning the close ones.
3. Texas A&M: Get warmup road tests at Baylor and Colorado.
4. Pittsburgh: Lots of teams I could put here instead.

3 comments:

Neel Mehta said...

Right now, I certainly believe about 6-7 teams will make the tournament, but only 1-3 will be seeded 4th or higher.

Don't know who's in the top tier of the ACC yet, but Duke is starting to look like a second tier team. More on them later.

Neel Mehta said...

4. Pittsburgh: Lots of teams I could put here instead.

Actually, this is a bit of lazy research on my part. I was under the incorrect assumption that Pitt was on a losing skid. (I must have mistaken them for another team, but can't think of who.) So far they've only lost to Wisconsin and OK State on the road. No shame in that. I'll rectify their seed next week.

bdure said...

Yeah, Duke is looking like a 5 or 6 seed right now. You have to figure Paulus can't be that bad each night, so they aren't quite as bad as they looked against Virginia Tech. But the only convincing wins they have right now are Air Force (seriously) and Gonzaga.

They're young, so they should improve as the season goes on. If not, they could almost be an NIT team. Scary.