Bracketology: 3 Seed/East
After this weekend, ESPN has pushed Michigan up to a 3 in their latest version:
http://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/bracketology
Bracket Matrix has Michigan at a 4; however, I believe it is not updated to show what happened yesterday.
MSU is at 3, Ohio State has fallen to a 5.
against MSU is what will probably keep them ahead of us.
I still say the committee should discount our loss to NW on account of the early injury to Livers. We were up four when he went out. Lost by like 15 without him. Duncan is great in 20-25 min when we can play matchups but for us to lose our starter in that game hurt.
Don’t most smaller conferences finish their tournaments early as well? Could be a bit of an equalizer in terms of rust. I’m mostly worried about the first game because I think we’ll be good to go by the round of 32.
I think only a few besides ours are done right now - the Big South, Missouri Valley, Ohio Valley and perhaps one or two others are. A few more are finished either today or tomorrow, and then nearly all of the rest start this week and finish this coming weekend. Quite a few don't begin until Wednesday.
I'll see the 3 and raise you to a 2!
Seriously though, this team beat two top 10 teams to win the BTT, and were already ranked 15. In essence a 4 spot leaves them where they were before the tournament and a 3 is up marginally. They really deserve to be the 2 in Detroit.
I admire your enthusiasm. The committee doesn't look at the AP rankings to determine seeding. While you could make a good argument that Michigan is playing basketball at the level of a top-8 team right now, you can't realistically argue that they've got one of the eight best tournament résumés, and that's only likely to get worse as other conferences finish up.
Keep in mind, in the RPI -- which is terrible, and every year the committee promises finally to stop using, and then every year relapses and uses anyway -- Michigan is currently a 4 seed.
Now the fourth 3 seed on the Bracket Matrix as well, with a range of 2-5 (even among brackets that have updated since yesterday -- for example, this guy has Michigan as a 5: "Five teams have punched their tickets to the dance. Congratulations to Michigan on there incredible run through the Big Ten tournament." Props for getting it right in one sentence and then wrong in the next sentence. That's some serious grammar-fu. ;)
but some of the enthusiastic folks here seem to assume that the committee will determine the bracket with the same 'the sky is the limit' buzz that fans - and the more excitable members of the media - have after this run.
However, you have to think - in the cold light of day - that they're also going to consider *why* we were a #5 seed in the Big Ten tournament to begin with.
At the end of the day though, you're not going to the Final Four without beating very good teams. End of story. I fully agree with whoever said upthread that nowadays it's rare that there's unbeatable super teams and it's rare for the top 4 teams to just be head and shoulders above the dozen teams behind them. We will have our chances..and so will other teams. No guarantees in the tournament.
and the reason is that we played a difficult schedule that included road games at each of the top 5 teams in the conference. Very few other teams in any conference with an unbalanced schedule can say that. Two teams that finished ahead of us played very, very different schedules.
Also, we tied for 4th in the conference but lost the tiebreaker because we didn't get to host the team we tied with.
So yeah, they'll look at the circumstances and it'll be favorable for us.
I wouldn't put us at a 2 because we did lose to LSU on neutral court and have the bad loss to Northwestern. 7 losses is also pretty high for a 2 seed, especially with how top-heavy the Big Ten was this year. 4 is too low. I mean we have wins against MSU, MSU, Purdue, OSU. Not to mention the win at Texas, UCLA, Nebraska, Penn St. 3 seed I think is accurate.
Hard to have bracketology set before the other conference tourneys