Where we Head from Here

Later Round NCAA Tournament Predictions

    Good evening! Having observing one weekend of the NCAA Tournament already, it's safe to say that this wasn't an expected outcome at all with the highest total sum of the seeds ever seen in a sweet 16. Only 7 teams on the top 4 seed lines actually made it to the sweet 16, and the average seed in this year's sweet 16 was a lofty 5.875. Without further ado, I'll share who I think makes it out of each region.

West

Teams Remaining: No. 1 Gonzaga, No. 5 Creighton, No. 6 USC, No. 7 Oregon

    Boring as it may be, I just don't have a reason to go against the Zags. They're currently undefeated and have convincing wins both in the tournament and against top teams. I do think the winner of the Pac-12 showdown will give the Bulldogs a run for their money, but they won't quite be able to knock them out of the whole dance. In that game, I give the slight edge to the Ducks because I feel like they were better tested last round than USC. Both teams were dominant, but Kansas was still feeling the COVID pause, which makes Oregon's offensive throbbing the more impressive performance. Tack on that Dana Altman is a extremely solid coach, and I think he'll get his Ducks a trip to the elite 8.

South

Teams Remaining: No. 1 Baylor, No. 5 Villanova, No. 3 Arkansas, No. 15 Oral Roberts

    This is the region which I'm really uncertain about who will be advancing to April play. As the bottom matchup is easier to decide, I'll dissect that one first. Oral Roberts has been a phenomenal story, but the clock is about to strike midnight for this Cinderella. No team worse than a 12-seed has ever advanced past the sweet 16, and I have no reason to assume that streak will break here. The Hogs, while showing signs of vulnerability in the tourney thus far, have been great at closing out games. I predict that they'll close out yet another team in the sweet 16.

    Baylor vs. Villanova is a much trickier game to predict: before the tournament started, I would have gone with Baylor easily, but the Wildcats have managed to shine in the absence of Colin Gillespie. I thought they were going to lose to Winthrop, but they have convincingly won both of their games, as have the Bears. I do think that whoever wins this game will advance to the final four. While Villanova have exceeded expectations thus far, guard play wins out further into the tournament, and Baylor have among the best set of guards in the nation. I pick the Bears to advance out of the South.

Midwest

Teams Remaining: No. 8 Loyola Chicago, No. 12 Oregon State, No. 11 Syracuse, No. 2 Houston

    Oh how close we were to having a sweet 16 where the average seed in the region was a double digit. Had Rutgers not choked the final minutes against Houston, we'd be sitting in a sweet 16 where the eighth-seeded ramblers were the best seed remaining. With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and say that I believe the Syracuse Orange will come out of the Midwest region. I really don't know why I'm so confident in this Boeheim squad other than their past NCAA Tournament experience as a double digit seed. In 2016, Syracuse were the first team to reach the final four as a 10-seed, and made another run to the sweet 16 in 2018 as an 11-seed. I've still not completely bought into Houston, especially after a game that the Cougars arguably shouldn't have won. We can also point out the Sister Jean herself put Loyola in the elite 8, which I agree with after seeing their consistently strong performance in their victory over the Illini. The Beavers, on the other hand, came out of the round of 32 alive, but not without allowing the Cowboys to claw back into a game that appeared to be over. There has been a trend that the Pac-12 bid thieves make their way into the sweet 16, but the run always ends here. Anticipate the Orange taking down the Ramblers to reach another final four appearance.

East

Teams Remaining: No. 1 Michigan, No. 4 Florida State, No. 11 UCLA, No. 2 Alabama

    It still surprises me that of all the Big Ten teams to still be remaining in the tournament, it happens to be the vulnerable Livers-less Wolverines. LSU could have very easily won that game if they didn't take a few ill-advised shots. Michigan are still without their top scorer, and they will dearly miss that against a Seminoles team that dominated against a team from the overachieving Pac-12 in Colorado. Florida State will hold another team to under 60 points and continue their run to the elite 8. 

    On the bottom half of the east region, we have the 11th-seeded UCLA Bruins up against Alabama, the 2-seed. Both teams have looked quite solid, making it a bit difficult to choose this matchup. I'm tempted to roll with the Tide just because they've been better at closing out games throughout the season, though UCLA have been doing better during the tournament. I do think that whoever wins this game will eventually lose to Florida State in the elite 8, putting a second team from the ACC in the final four.

Final Four Predictions

1 Gonzaga vs. 4 Florida State

1 Baylor vs. 11 Syracuse

So that pretty much wraps up this unscientific prediction, and while I could predict the rest of the tournament from here, I'm simply going to take it one game (or in this case, two) at a time, just like how teams still playing will be doing. And feel free to flame me when these picks turn out to be completely incorrect.

Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen

 Several Powerhouse Teams Already Sent Packing

    There has been an unprecedented number of top teams that have already exited the NCAA Tournament. Today, I will be looking at teams in the top two seed lines who have suffered an early defeat. I want to see if we can find any common weaknesses in these teams or common strengths in the foes that knocked them out of the big dance.

Iowa (No. 2 West), Ohio State (No. 2 South), Illinois (No. 1 Midwest)

    I group these three teams together because all of them are Big Ten juggernauts who are among the top 8 overall teams. Briefly looking at Torvik's ranking page, there will be a lot of advanced statistics laid out in front of you. Naturally these teams would be at the top of most rankings, however all three of these teams really struggled in one category: defensive turnover efficiency. All three of these teams ranked outside the top 300 in this statistic, but what's interesting is that top-seeded Michigan also had a terrible defensive turnover rate, yet they advanced to the second weekend despite appearing more vulnerable than any team that was a top two seed.

Oregon (No. 7 West), Oral Roberts (No. 15 South), Loyola Chicago (No. 8 Midwest)

    There were a couple statistics that all three of these teams shared a similarly high ranking, both of which involving shooting percentage. All of these teams were among the top 65 in 3-point shooting percentage, and were more importantly inside the top 50 in effective field goal percentage. LSU, on the other hand, were ranked 74 in EFG% and 122 in 3P%. It seems as if the aforementioned teams took advantage of their opponents not being able to consistently force turnovers, and converted that into points with their impressive shooting percentage marks.

Catching up After the First Weekend of March Madness

A Little Insight Into My Imperfect Bracket

    What a first weekend of March Madness we witnessed! To anyone whose brackets are still alive and well (which there are not many of you), I wish you all good luck. My bracket has definitely not survived all of the madness with 3 of my 4 Final Four predictions having perished thus far. While I definitely did not pay as much attention to college basketball as I did last year (watched the day of Selection Sunday and looked at some team profiles using Bart Torvik's T-Rank Site), the "experts" couldn't explain some of these losses either. I thought I was going to have a genuinely solid bracket with the little research that I did, but as that has appeared to not be the case, I would like to take a look at what's happened so far and see if there are any trends among my catastrophically incorrect predictions

My one and only bracket for the 2021 NCAA Tournament

General Strategy:

    Obviously when making an unscientific bracket, gut comes first: it feels way worse to have a shitty bracket that came from someone else than if it comes from you. I started with who I wanted to make it out of each region because picking a common team to make the final four has much better yield than successfully predicting whatever cinderellas happen to make it out of the round of 64. I went slightly chalkier than your typical bracket because I have no chance of correctly predicting it all, but not too chalk to the point that it's boring (looking at you Obama). I love a good mid-major upset story just as much as the next person.

How I picked my final four:

    I generally looked at teams who had good showings in their conference tournaments to continue that success here, because it logically made sense to ride teams who had already proven to be successful in a tournament environment. I also looked at the overall strength of the region (in my subjective, uneducated mind of course) to determine which teams I felt confident in choosing to last it out until April. 

    Gonzaga was practically a shoe-in since Iowa wasn't a particularly strong 2-seed, and the other top seeded teams in the West, Kansas and Virginia, were fresh off of COVID pauses, putting them down as a question mark.

    Ohio State might have been me falling for big-name syndrome, but the main factor that set me to choose them to make it out of the South region was how they fared on Selection Sunday: they went toe-to-toe with Illinois (who will be talked about soon), another team who carried an insane amount of momentum, and topped with Baylor being rather shaky after their COVID pause, I chose to ignore their four game skid to end the regular season and slot them in my final four.

    Surprisingly, Illinois was my final four pick that I was least confident about. Even though all they were doing come tournament time was winning, I had a feeling that maybe a Loyola Chicago, or more likely an Oklahoma State team who had defeated several top-ranked teams to end the season, could end the Fighting Illini's chances. I had seriously considered putting the Cowboys in my final four instead for these reasons, but I wasn't particularly confident that they would make it out of the early rounds, while I was much more willing to bet on Illinois in their other matches compared to Oklahoma St. Houston did not impress me at all and West Virginia couldn't appear to get a win streak going, so I was definitely not choosing anyone on the bottom half of the Midwest to make it out.

    Lastly, we have Texas. As a 3-seed, the Longhorns were my "gutsiest" final four prediction, which makes it all the more surprising that we're having this conversation today. First of all, Michigan was looking like a complete joke of a 1-seed going into the tournament, so there was no shot I was putting them in my final four. Alabama also won their conference tournament, but the SEC was weaker and the Crimson Tide weren't super convincing over a middling LSU team who did put up a pretty good fight to be fair. I also just preferred Texas' extremely balanced scoring attack with 5 players putting up at least 9 PPG, which Alabama is close to but doesn't quite achieve. Depth tends to win out in the NCAA tournament, so it made sense to pick a team who both had depth and was tournament tested. I was also more worried about Alabama falling early to a Bouknight-led Huskies team in the early rounds than any team in Texas' pod. There might have also been the factor of wanting to pick a team outside of the top two seeds, but I genuinely did think Texas had it in them to make it to April.

Choosing Upsets:

    I made sure to not choose too many upsets that I would not realistically predict all correctly because I could do much better off picking the safe team to advance without risking my entire bracket. Because of this, I only picked upsets in places where I wouldn't have picked the favorite to advance much farther anyway. This is why I didn't pick Loyola to beat Illinois, because even though I thought it was a possibility, there was a chance that a rolling Georgia Tech took down the Ramblers, and Illinois had so much more potential to make a deep run outside of just making it to the sweet 16. Take Colgate for example: I recognized that their 3-point percentage was scarily high, and technically had a top 10, albeit severely inflated, net ranking. This, combined with Arkansas not really popping out at me as a true top team, allowed me to take a flier on the Raiders. I was comfortable with this because I was picking Texas Tech to advance to the sweet 16 no matter who won that matchup, so I went with the realistic cinderella. I honestly don't know why Arkansas flew under my radar considering they were on a roll to end the season, but I think I just saw them go down early in the conference tournament, and they striked me as a team that wasn't cut out for March.

    Looking back on my predictions, I was not high on the Pac-12 at all. I definitely remember picking Pac-12 teams to go far in previous tournaments for them to disappoint, so I tended to pick against the conference as a whole (which turned out to be a huge mistake). I picked Drake to defeat USC, one of my least researched predictions, so I would definitely say that this was a gut prediction since I didn't have confidence in the other 11-seeds to pull a first round upset. One pick I was significantly more confident in was picking Georgetown over Colorado: the Hoyas rolled through the Big East tourney, an indicator that they were finally finding their form, so it was easy for me to make this a classic 12-5 upset over an apparent over-seeded Buffaloes squad who were also fresh off a loss to an Oregon State team who has followed a similar path as Georgetown. I then picked the Hoyas to defeat Florida State in the round of 32 due to the Seminoles' struggles against tournament teams away from home, and my lack of confidence in them to beat their sweet 16 opponent (who we will talk about very soon) should they make it.

    My elite 8 had mostly normal picks with two that were a bit more unconventional. We'll start off with LSU. Their strong performance in the SEC tournament caught my eye, as well as their apparent strong under-seeding according to Bracket Matrix. I tend to like teams who have a worse seed than they should because it means that the top teams may not be prepared to play a foe like them. This, combined with Michigan being without Isaiah Livers, actually made it a rather easy choice to send the Wolverines packing after their match against LSU. I didn't see any potential sweet 16 team who seemed particularly threatening, so I decided to keep the Tigers rolling.

    San Diego State was my other elite 8 sleeper. Looking back on it, if I picked any 6-seed to make a run it should have been USC. The Aztecs were generally over-seeded according to bracketologists and the Trojans might have been slightly under-seeded. That being said, what led me to pick SDSU was more based off the bottom half of the Midwest being particularly unappealing rather than the Aztecs being good themselves. I did like how they had rubbed off their early season woes and boasted a winning streak over a dozen games long going into the tournament. Their first round opponent, Syracuse, did not beat a tournament team away from home all season, so I had no reason to think they'd finally break that streak here. West Virginia appeared to be over-seeded, which indicated to me that this was an opportunity to take the mid-major sleeper. And just looking at resumes, Houston looked to be an extremely weak 2-seed. While they won their major opportunity against Texas Tech, it didn't seem like the Cougars really set themselves apart from the rest of the AAC with losses to Tulsa, East Carolina, and Wichita State. With these warning signs, I kept the Aztecs going another round.

In the next post, I will be looking at commonalities among the slain powerhouses of the tournament and see if I can avoid making such blunders in the future. To be continued...