2020 ncaa tournament

[David Wilcomes]

Brian • February 25, 2020 • 12:14pm

Zipping on up

God bless the Big Ten: back-to-back road wins against teams that are collectively 16-18 in conference play are not just Quad 1 victories, but Quad 1-A wins. Joe Lunardi was referring to Michigan as a seven-seed literally during the Purdue game. Today they're a 5*. Michigan is also on the five-line in Jerry Palm's bracket.

The BracketMatrix, which is often a lagging indicator but is pretty good on Tuesdays, has moved Michigan up to the last 5. There are a few different projections with Michigan on the four line already, and a couple of the dumber automated brackets are holding Michigan back. RealTimeRPI, which still exists for reasons I cannot fathom, barely has Michigan in the field, and KPI has them as an eight-seed.

You may remember that KPI is actually on the teamsheets because Mark Hollis thought it, like Tom Anastos, was a good idea. A couple years ago it was also badly lagging reality in re: Michigan, which caused me to point out that it was 112th of 113 qualifiers on the Matrix, a truly incredible record for something the committee actually has in the room with them. Good news and bad news for Kevin Pagua: KPI is now beating four BracketMatrix brackets. It is 134th out of 138.

Anyway. T-Ranketology—which projects the rest of the season, unlike the human bracketologists—has good news and bad news. The good news: Michigan's a four. The bad news is that Michigan slots in just behind MSU, which has pod implications discussed below. More good news: the Livers version of Michigan is about 4 points of efficiency margin better than the non-Livers version so projections are pessimistic until such time as a cartoon steamroller crushes Livers into atoms.

*[As per usual with Lunardi he sets up a bracket the committee will not implement since the #4 is Oregon, who Michigan played. It is uncanny the consistency with which he does this when bracketing Michigan. To be fair, Palm did the exact same thing. This may bother me more than it should.]

[After THE JUMP: hope you like six-way ties]