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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Bracketology 101: Class Is in Session
By Rick Wright
Of the Journal
Attention, NCAA Tournament junkies: As of this morning, only 46 bracketing days remain before Selection Sunday.
Let's start now and avoid the February rush, shall we? Bracketology's a lot more fun than Christmas shopping, and it doesn't cost anything if you don't want it to.
For the Mountain West Conference, and for its individual members, there's good news and bad news.
The bad: Brigham Young's losses to UNM at the Pit and at home to UNLV likely have doomed the league's chances of getting a top-half-of-the-bracket seed in the men's NCAA Tournament. The Cougars, with two good losses (Arizona State, Wake Forest) on their résumé but lacking good wins entering Tuesday night's game against the Utes, now have a couple of bad losses.
Meanwhile, like lobsters in a pot, MWC member schools keep crawling over each other — only to drop back into the boil. Three losses, four losses? Heck, the way things are going, six losses might earn a share of the regular-season league title.
The good: Balance isn't necessarily a bad thing. The conference as a whole is far stronger than it was last season, and the NCAA's computer is taking note.
Maybe this is the year the Mountain West gets more than two teams into the NCAA men's field (for the first time since 2004).
The Mountain West (according to collegerpi.com as well as RealTimeRPI.com) ranks seventh in conference Ratings Percentage Index — behind only the six BCS conferences. The MWC ranks ahead of the Missouri Valley, the Atlantic 10 and Conference USA as well as the WAC, which is slogging along in 13th.
Last year, the Mountain West was ninth behind the Missouri Valley and the Atlantic 10.
According to the official RPI (through Sunday's games) released Monday by the NCAA, the Mountain West has:
n Three teams in the top 50 (Utah, BYU, UNLV).
n Seven in the top 100 (the aforementioned three plus San Diego State, UNM, TCU and Wyoming.
â– Only one, Air Force, outside the top 160.
Last year, four Mountain West teams ranked in the bottom half of the RPI at season's end. So far this season, with Colorado State having improved thus far by more than 100 spots, only Air Force constitutes a dead weight around the MWC's collective neck.
And because of CSU's improvement, the Lobos' RPI shouldn't suffer simply for having played the Rams tonight — assuming, of course, that UNM wins.
More good news/bad news:
The bad: On Tuesday, The Bracket Matrix — an online compilation of 40 bracketology Web sites and blogs — listed UNLV as an NCAA 10th seed and BYU as an 11th. No other Mountain West team made the imaginary 65-team field.
The good: Utah was listed as the first team out of the consensus field and appeared on 16 of the 40 brackets. San Diego State and TCU got two mentions apiece. And Jerry Palm of collegerpi.com has UNLV, BYU and Utah in his bracket.
For the Lobos, the bad news is this: They didn't get a sniff, and aren't likely to.
Even though they've risen from a 300-plus RPI on Dec. 3 to a mid-80s spot this week, the Lobos would have to spread-eagle the conference between now and March to make the NCAA field — unless they can win the MWC tournament on UNLV's home floor.
For the Lobos, here's the good news: Bracketology's an inexact science — especially on Jan. 28.
Still, as January Jitters give way to February Fever, March Madness looms as large as Utah center Luke Nevill in the lane.
So, why wait?
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