A Jersey Guy: March Chaos Instead of Madness?
By now, the usual traffic of a college basketball season should be starting to clear out.
The great teams are pulling away from the good teams, who are distancing themselves from the average teams, who are running away from the poor teams.
It is all part of the process for a sport that lives--and dies--off March Madness.
New story lines are created, but eventually class asserts itself.
This season, however, may be the exception.
Oh, there are a few cornerstones, seemingly set in concrete.
Baylor and Gonzaga or Gonzaga and Baylor are the two top teams, the only two squads who have yet to lose a game.
And maybe Michigan is emerging as the front runner in the Big Ten.
But after that?
Jump ball.
Consider some results over the past few days, which have to be classified as upsets.
Unranked Oklahoma State 75, No. 6 Texas 67
No. 18 Missouri 68, No. 10 Alabama 65
Unranked USC 66, No 21 UCLA 48
Unranked Indiana 67, No. 8 ranked Iowa 65
Add the uneven number of games because of COVID-19 postponements and you have more uncertainty.
Consider some conference races:
America East leader UMC-Baltimore County has played 16 games. Prime contender Vermont has played only 10.
Other discrepancies in number of games played.
AAC--Houston (18) Temple (11)
A10--St. Bonaventure (11) VCU (17)
Patriot League--Navy (13) American (4).
The Big East has been a daily news source of Ppd and rescheduled games.
"Games are being made up,'' conceded Big East Associate Commissioner John Paquette, "but as we go deeper into the season, it is becoming tougher to find slots to reschedule them. I don't think there is any question that we are going to have an un even number of games played among our teams at the end of the season.''
Then there is the blue chip drought.
Right now such perennials for March Madness face time such as North Carolina, Duke and Michigan State are bubble teams at best in most NCAA projection brackets.
Other schools such as Kentucky will have to play their way into the NCAA tournament with championships in their conference tournaments.
The Big Ten is this season's consensus choice as the best conference, with the potential of ten or even 11 teams making the field.
But after Michigan there is a chaotic parity.
Iowa, which has been a solid Top 5 team (in the country) through much of the season has lost for its last five games.
Who knows how it will sort itself out in early March when the conference tournaments are scheduled to be played and a week later when the NCAA tournament field of 68 teams is selected.
And after Baylor and Gonzaga, good luck seeing that field.
It is way too early to start putting together brackets, but it is not too early to start sorting out the Top 16 seeds.
So here's this week's guesstimate.
No. 1 seeds--Gonzaga, Baylor, Michigan, Villanova
No. 2 seeds-Houston, Alabama, Illinois, Ohio State
No. 3 seeds--Virginia, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Texas Tech
No. 4 seeds--Iowa, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri