Baylor basketball rises in latest ESPN bracketology projections
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Every Tuesday morning, ESPN college basketball analyst Joe Lunardi releases his predictions for the NCAA tournament bracket.
In recent weeks, the Baylor Bears (4-1) have hovered around the 7-10 seed range and in the latest iteration, Baylor sits as the #7 seed in the Midwest region. With the current projection, they would face #10 seed Iowa Hawkeyes (5-0). The two programs met once before, the 2013 NIT tournament championship game, which the Bears won 74-54.
The currently undefeated Hawkeyes have looked dominant (as they should) against Robert Morris, Western Illinois, Xavier, Southeast Missouri State and Chicago State. Bennett Stirtz leads the Hawkeyes with 17.6 points per game and 6.2 assists per game.
With the newest projection, Baylor is joined in the Midwest bracket (ordered by seed #) by Purdue, Louisville, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas, USC, Clemson, Iowa, Liberty, Akron, High Point, Troy, Florida Gulf Coast and Long Island. Baylor hosts Kansas (5-2) January 16 and hosts #6 Louisville (6-0) on February 14.
New region
This week had Baylor in new scenery because they had previously been slotted to play in the East region before being moved to the Midwest. The Midwest region is matched up with the West region, which has a couple of familiar foes for Baylor in Arizona (1 seed) and Texas Tech (6 seed). Baylor would be playing Iowa in St. Louis, a location they have never played at in the NCAA tournament.
This version of the West region is top heavy with four teams currently ranked in the top 10 of the AP poll and a fifth team (Kentucky) is also ranked as of 11/26. The regular season schedule does Baylor no favors with eight games against current ranked teams in the AP Top 25.
The breakdown of teams by conference has the Big Ten with the most at 12 teams projected to make the tournament followed by the SEC with 11 teams and the Big 12 getting seven teams.
Baylor may drop or stay put in next week’s bracketology after beating Creighton by seven on Monday and losing by 15 to #14 St. John’s on Tuesday night. They will return to the court on 12/2 when they host Sacramento State at 8 p.m.
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Allen began covering college sports as an intern for InsidetheGators.com for the Florida Gators 2021 football season. He has been a freelance sportswriter for the past four years at newspapers such as the Ocala Gazette, Ocala Star-Banner and GatorBait Media. As a lifelong sports fan, Allen's dream is to cover sports every day.