NCAA Tournament Bracket Reactions

Above is what a friend and I came up with for our projection of what the bracket should be.

As you can see we missed two teams. Iona and California got in over Seton Hall and Tennessee. But we also had 14 teams mis-seeded.

-We chose Seton Hall and Tennessee because they actually beat some people. It looks like the DePaul loss was the dagger for Seton Hall because for me, beating VCU, UConn and Georgetown are better wins than St. Joseph's (Iona's best RPI win) and Oregon (Cal's best RPI win). Tennessee was a reach because it was largely believed that they weren't in the bracket going in to the SEC tournament and would need to play their way in but it was too hard to ignore sweeping Florida and beating UConn and Vandy as well. We didn't have Drexel for the final 2 spots. I love Iona being in the field, I love mid-majors but I just don't think they earned their way in (2 sub-200 RPI losses too). I think this is one of the biggest examples of the selection committee going by the "eye-ball" test that I've ever seen. Cal is only in based on them being in the PAC-12. I'm sure of it.

-I'm not really going to complain too much about seedings but I think Louisville should have jumped Marquette as the 2nd Big East team. We had them as a 2 seed and they got a 4. It seems to me that the committee didn't really weigh the Big East tournament championship. They were probably a 4 seed prior to the tournament anyway.

-Why was St. Louis so comfortably in the tournament as a 9 seed? Other than winning 2 of 3 against Xavier, I don't see where their other good wins came from. And a 198 non-conference schedule doesn't impress me at all. I'm surprised they didn't have to sweat on Selection Sunday.

-I'll admit we underseeded Indiana. I think we were just familiar with Indiana so we didn't dig in to their profile enough. But after looking at them more closely, we were definately wrong. 8-5 against the top 50 is as good as anyone else along that seed line.

-I hate Wichita State and VCU playing in the first round. Two teams I'd really like to root for.

-I will never call the Tuesday and Wednesday games anything other than the "First Four" or "play-in" games. The first round starts on Thursday and the NCAA has to stop kidding themselves.

-It seems this year the selection committee really leaned on the RPI more than I can remember in the past. By the criteria they went by it looks like Marshall was probably closer than we think to a bid since they were the only bubble team with a sub-50 RPI not to make the tournament. It seems like the cutoff was 53 (West Virginia). And that also explains why there are rumors that Oral Roberts was the team that got bumped by St. Bonnie's winning the A10. Their RPI was 55. And back to Iona, theirs was 42 which is literally the only postive number on their profile other than the names on their roster.