Zags will be a 3 seed, unless, of course, they aren’t
Office production slows to a drip until further notice with the announcement this afternoon of the NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket – hieroglyphics that 24th century archeologists will find on our cave walls and puzzle over, like the fossilized remains of the pinwheel imprisoned in Dick Vitale’s skull.
The Zags? They’ll be a No. 3 seed. Playing in Salt Lake City. Against Montana.
Tipoff will be 5:08 p.m. PST. Kevin Harlan and Dan Bonner will call the game for CBS. The final score will be 78-72. The officiating will be suspect. A cowboy will curse you-know-who. Double pepperoni will be on the postgame menu. The local school levy will pass. “Big Love” will be a big bomb. Your wife will insist on recarpeting the family room this summer. Your husband will want a new boat instead.
Hey, what am I, Jeane Dixon? You’ll know when you know.
The seeding frenzy has been in overdrive since the Bulldogs survived their West Coast colonoscopy last Monday against Loyola Marymount and secured the league’s automatic NCAA berth. Not that they needed it, but they’re a little proprietary about the whole thing.
In any case, the debate generally splinters into three groups:
“The Choir, who will accept a No. 2 seed, but only because Memphis and UConn beat the Zags and Duke and Villanova spinelessly ducked them (heh, heh, heh);
“The Cloistered Moderates, who grudging allow – if you get one alone, off the record, under the cover of darkness, using an alias – that it won’t be Armageddon if GU is a No. 3, and
“The Neo-Haters, who will be outraged if the Zags aren’t assigned to the Tuesday play-in game against Hampton.
The bracketing committee is buried under more math than even I failed in school, but my guess is a 3 seed, based on the very unscientific and invented statistic of Unimpeachables – victories over teams among the Top 25 in the NCAA’s Ratings Percentage Index, the computer rankings sportswriters have been demonizing for a decade or more.
The No. 1 seeds – Duke, Memphis, UConn and Villanova, presumably – all have multiple Unimpeachables. Ditto the likely No. 2s – Texas, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio State. That tends to back up your bona fides.
The Zags? They beat Michigan State back in November in what even now remains the best game of the year. But the Spartans finished sixth in the Big Ten, and that’s the kind of team the old, scrappy, underdog Gonzaga used to bark at as being less deserving of an at-large berth than, well, Gonzaga.
Again, no science.
Perhaps of greater intrigue is whether the committee builds on its good work of a year ago and rewards what we’ll call Competitive Intent, or not ducking.
“It’s been pretty clear that the committee over time has sent the message that it will not be impressed by records that are artificially built on the basis of scheduling lesser-quality opponents,” said the chairman, Craig Littlepage, the athletic director at Virginia.
Over time? Try the last couple years, maybe.
Littlepage means non-conference games – the only part of the schedule over which a team has control. Gonzaga has to play its 14 WCC games, just as Seton Hall didn’t get the pleasure of laying down twice for UConn in the unbalanced Big East.
The problem with scheduling, of course, is that it has to be done in advance. So even with sincere Competitive Intent, you might still wind up with opponents that have been traditionally nasty but which turned out to be something less this season. An example, in Gonzaga’s case, might be Oklahoma State, which was weaving through traffic even before Eddie Sutton was.
Nevertheless, the Zags wound up playing 11 games against Top 150 teams in the non-conference season – seven of them away from Spokane. Duke and Memphis also ranked high in Competitive Intent.
But Pittsburgh, as a comparison, played just five Top 150s, and only one away. UConn, legit as they come, booked seven Bottom 100 teams, four of them no-hopers like Stony Brook, who I could have sworn was a calf roper.
If we’re comparing six to eight teams,” said Littlepage, “and two of those have put together a schedule with rigor, and they’ve been balanced in terms of playing games both home and away, the tiebreaker is going to go with the teams that have scheduled and challenged themselves.”
It would seem the challenge is the committee’s, then.
And those predictions? They aren’t written in Stony.