Bracket Watch: February 14th, 2020
Iowa as a virtual lock? What separates them from Tier 2?
Not to get too far ahead of things, but a spot in the East Region and second weekend games in MSG aka Crisler East would be real nice.
Enjoyed the post. Feels comforting that we’re safely in barring a collapse. From your experience is there actually any validity to the committee saying that they consider injuries when seeding? Or is that only in high-profile situations to give Duke a pass? 
Personally a not a fan of considering injuries in seeding but if Michigan might benefit from it, I’ll take it.
Nothing MSG would like more than Duke and Michigan heading up a sweet 16 bracket.
It seems like if we win our 3 home games, we’re probably in- however I’d be a bit nervous if we were 18-14 after a first round BTT loss.
I’m thinking a 4-3 finish is very possible and then get a BTT win and we’re 20-13 and a 7-10 seed. Not what I expected after Atlantis, but certainly in line with my preseason expectations.
While Michigan’s non-con SOS certainly isn’t bad (I only start penalizing teams if they’re below 175 or so), it could be so much better.
In fairness, I imagine if UNC and Iowa State didn’t turn into dumpster fires, the NC-SOS would still be easily within the top 100 even with those low buy games.
My big issue with NC-SOS and SOS on the team sheets is that it uses the old RPI component and not something smarter. I see no reason why there can’t be a NET-based SOS.
I’ve been wondering about that. I saw some people espousing some team’s really hard schedule (don’t remember who at this point) then I looked at KenPom’s numbers and their schedule was nothing to write home about and I started to wonder where they get their SOS numbers. That’s really frustrating that they “got rid of the RPI” but still use it as their SOS indicator. Makes absolutely no sense.
I’m confused how Michigan can have a SoS of 52 given the number of Quad 1 games they’ve played and how good the Big Ten is this year. IIRC Kenpom has Michigan’s SoS in the top 10.
This is excellent, thank you. A 6 seed for Michigan would be great…I’ve always preferred the 6 seed to the 4 or 5 seeds, just to avoid playing 1 seeds for as long as possible. The gaps between teams get pretty small once you get past the 1 seeds.
Part of that too, I would argue, is avoiding the elite mid-major teams in favor of a middling bubble P5 11-seed as well. Plus, like you said, a three-seed is much better second round competition than a one-seed.
Ace Anbender at Mgoblog got Bart Torvik to look at Michigan’s splits with and without Livers, and we’re #11 in the country when Livers plays. Regardless of where we get seeded (presuming it’s in that 6-10 range as this article predicts), people are going to hate seeing us in their part of the bracket.
Yeah, I think that is really going to depend on the next month (hopefully) with a healthy Livers.
Going back and grabbing the Bahamas games will make any splits look good though 
Baseline for Michigan is to defend home court down the stretch. If it can win a couple road games then I think it is fair to start raising expectations.