It looks like Lunardi still has us as a 9 seed even after UCF loss. Like Dylan has mentioned I think a .500 Big Ten season guarantees us in tourney and maybe in a better position than a play in game as long as we win at least 1 or 2 big games.
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On the bracket matrix, we’re about half in/half out on brackets updated on 12/31 or later. I honestly don’t see how we could possible be in. Gotta be enough teams with better resumes.
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I was watching a Jeff Goodman podcast last night on twitter and they said the ACC is just trash and could only think of 2 teams guaranteed in tourney. Wake, Miami, Louisville and VT being the other options. But i think a lot of other conferences are just trash this year. Usually Lonardi and Palm are spot on and both have us in and around 8 and 9 seed as of Dec 31
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Michigan can’t drop any more games to teams they should beat, which would give them around 10 wins in the conference. Then they have to pick up a couple wins against the Purdue/Illinois/OSU/MSU teams that are favored. I’m honestly not seeing it happen right now.
They need to beat Rutgers this week, but they are built just like the teams Michigan has struggled against. Baker is 6-4 and a great iso player, which we’ve really struggled with. McConnel and Mulcahey are 6-6ish who can hamper Houstan/Brooks’ ability to get shots up. Then you’ve got the ability to double Hunter even with Omoruyi big enough to defend him because of our lack of shooting at the 4. A loss to Rutgers, then MSU, Purdue, and Illinois the next 3 could put us below .500 in mid-January. That would be a really deep hole to climb out of.
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It’s obviously irrelevant right now because a lot will change, but Lunardi has Michigan as the first team OUT of the tournament in his latest update. He has UCF as the last team IN.
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Seems nuts to me to be considered somewhat safely in with the current resume. But honestly I haven’t followed college basketball as closely due to Michigan’s struggles so not sure how weak the bubble is.
Bracketology in January 
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MSU as a 2 seed… yeah for sure 
All that escalated quickly. How is Indiana in, I hope we figure it out because tourney time is the best time of year and would be a real disappointment not making it.
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Definitely. Coming off the accomplishments last year I’m mostly fine with taking a step back, not being a top team and probably not competing for the B1G title. But missing out on the tourney buzz would be awful. Good thing we’ll have plenty of opportunities for big wins coming up. Need to actually get them though.
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MSU is #1 on BT’s WAB metric so a #2 seed for them at the moment makes a lot of sense
The two things that really stand out for this team are the lack of a true wing defender (especially after four years of Franz and Matthews) and lack of shooting. Combine those together and you have a very narrow margin for success.
I agree with Dylan that we lack a certain nebulous quality (leadership, toughness, maturity, etc.) that seems to turn things from bad to worse at times…but I think that is just revealed by the narrow margins we’re living on. If you make a couple of threes it calms everyone down…but we don’t have a lot of guys who can do that. If you can get a big defensive stop to thwart a run by a hot shooter, it calms everyone down, but we haven’t done that.
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We’ll have to play better and win our fair share of league games to make the tourney. It’s not like that’s something we needed to hear from Lunardi to know, right?
I mean, I like lists and predictions too, but until March they’re kinda meaningless. His final prediction is the only one that actually matters, but by then we’d all be capable of picking about 64 teams correctly.
Love what Juwan is doing with program and this is his first class of young studs without a ton of leadership. Will learn from it and hopefully adjust in the future
Scary part is that we see how Keegan Murray, Ivey, and Davis are doing with a sophomore jump and then we realize we might have 3 give or take 1 who might have the same kind of big jump 
(no obviously I don’t expect every single one of our sophomores to be a POTY candidate)