bierce

Dayton lost on the road to Loyola-Chicago. Toast. Fifth q2 loss. A-10 should be a one bid league unless VCU wins out the regular season but loses in the conference tournament, and it might not deserve a bid. Zero wins against NET top 50 teams. Zero q1 wins now that Dayton will drop out of the top 75.

Nova 81-66. Freshman Jordann Dumont had 14 career points entering the game. He attempted 5 shots. He made 4 3s. He was fouled on the 5th attempt, made all 3 free throws, and finished with 15 points. Nowhere to go but downhill from there.

Nova shot 80% bta in the first half, hitting 12 of 15. Up 68-53 with 6:44 to go.

Indiana fans today: "IT WORKED!"

South Carolina's last 5 home games: Three point loss to overall #1 seed Auburn. One point loss to projected 1 seed Florida OT loss to current #21 Mississippi State Four point loss to #7 A&M Four point come from ahead loss to #24 Mississippi Will definitely not be an easy game with or without Kaluma.

tOSU is the new addition to the list of teams on which bracketistoids are split. Starting to see it left off some brackets that were updated this morning. It joins OU, Vandy, Arky, and Wake Forest in the teams that are lacking near unanimity in selection. Georgia/SMU/Xavier are in a group of teams that still get mentioned in a handful of brackets, but they are each on a small minority of brackets, and only Xavier is rising in that group. TCU is also rising, but most of that is seen by its position on First Four out lists instead of lists of Mr. Not-Appearing-in-this-Film. I don't think TCU will get there short of it winning out and not embarrassing itself in the Big 12 tournament. Currently sporting a 2-4 q2 record, too many bad margin losses, and nothing on the OOC record to give it reason to brag, but it is 4-7 in q1 with 3 q1 games left. Sweeping bubble WVU and Cincy on the upcoming road trip would give it a huge boost leading to its home game against Baylor. Would be hard to ignore a team with 7 q1 wins.

And Cal State Northridge just put the stake into the heart of UC Irvine 84-72, giving UCI its third q3 loss. UCI has nothing but q3 and q4 games left on its schedule unless UC Santa Barbara can stay 135 or under. That is the problem with being a good team in a mid-major conference. You can't get home games against P5 schools, so all you have are maybe a couple of road games against middle of the P5 conference schools or a shot in a holiday tournament, wind up with no more than 3 q1 games on your entire schedule (and usually fewer) to go with maybe half a dozen q2s and 20-25 q3s and q4s. You are bound to lose a q2 game or two and at least 10% of the q3 games, so if you don't win most (and in some cases all) of your q1 games, you'll get skipped by the committee.

I'm happy for all bubble teams to keep losing, except us of course. Then we won't be worried at all about selection day. Arky is playing better than OU or Vandy or Georgia over the 6 games, that is certain.

Only one game of interest tomorrow. Nova hosts Marquette in what is its last chance to get a second q1 win before the conference tournament. I think Nova is dead in the water, but it would have a chance if it wins out and gets at least one good win in the BE tournament. Saturday will be a really big day for the bubble. Vandy, OU, Arky, and SMU will host ranked teams, and SDSU plays at Utah State, so we could see a lot of movement.

Yeah, I doubt they'll even fall out of the top 50, so it should stay as a q1 loss. Meanwhile, NMSU just won on the road to get some revenge against Ray Harper's Jacksonville State team. That will probably push NMSU back into the top 160, even if just barely, pushing that win at least temporarily back to a q3. But the big takeaway from the night is that we might have just pushed past tOSU and Nebraska on many brackets and are approaching the 9 line. A new team picked up some votes yesterday--TCU which beat Tech on Tuesday. TCU is NET 72, 3-7 q1 and 3-4 q2 but it has a couple of winnable q1 road games left as well as a possible q1 home game against Baylor which it beat in Waco earlier. Worst thing on its record is the 0-3 on neutral floors against Santa Clara, Colo State, and Vandy. Four point win over Xavier at home was only worthwhile OOC win.

Northwestern started the second half with a 12-1 run and is piling on tOSU in Columbus 54-29 with 11:23 left. Won't be a good loss for tOSU

I just noticed something. Wade is 10-0 against the Agroids in his coaching career.

It was step 2 in Barnes's path of finding his way out of Austin. Step 1 was the 2010 collapse and the unfortunate comment about not being obsessed with winning championships. Step 3 was losing to Chaminade in Maui, and CBI the season that followed. Step 4 was losing to Butler to finish that season on a 6-10 run.

Miller has had a really good career (and his own run-in with the scandals about pay for play before it became legal), and five second weekends in seven years is hard to ignore, but people should understand Arizona failed to make the tournament only 4 times since 1997, and all the teams that missed were during Miller's 12 years there. He also only had one team play above seed in his career, the 2011 team that beat us in the 4/5 game then went on to trash Duke to make the Elite Eight. OK, if you want you can call winning in the first round as a 9 seed "playing above seed," but since the 9 team wins almost half those games, I don't.

I'll let Tyler speak for himself, but it's hard to argue with Wade's resume of making programs better. He took over LSU after it went 2-16 in the SEC, and he had it winning the regular season title and making the S16 in 2 years. It had been 11 years since McNeese (then McNeese State) had a winning record in conference, and he went 17-1 there in his first year and managed to get former P5 players to go there this year. He didn't really improve VCU during his 2 years there, but he certainly didn't make it worse.