NCAA Basketball Tournament: West Regional Semifinal Predictions

This indicates that the ACC was probably way too overhyped before the tournament. Take the Big Ten teams and flip a coin.

2 – Sweet Sixteen teams that played in the NIT last season: South Carolina, Florida. It was not a pretty game, and USC shot 28 percent form deep, but they got the W with that late “clutch factor” that really talented players can muster after missing for 38 minutes. Wake Forest, a middle of the pack finisher, (albeit with future National Basketball Association players in John Collins and Bryant Crawford) were beaten by another average school from another conference, Kansas State of the Big 12. Not many believed the Trojans were over-seeded, yet I felt it was an injustice for them to play another under-seeded No. 11 Providence team in the First Four match-up.

The No. 5 seed Virginia Cavaliers from the East Region matched up with upset-minded and risky mid-major UNC-Wilmington in the first round. Virginia Tech was the first from the league to fall as Buzz Williams’ group lost to Wisconsin.

Go ahead and buy one or 20. “The league isn’t very tough”, one ACC assistant said. [8:30], Buzz around Brad Underwood hire at IL [13:00], Kansas vs. Purdue [18:45], MI vs. OR [21:55], Gonzaga vs. Miami went down in the first round to Michigan State on Friday, but that still left seven teams out of the final 32.

Take a look at Oregon’s Tyler Dorsey. Louisville eased past just happy to be there Jacksonville State but then fell to a red-hot MI team.

The No. 1 line and the No. 3 both had three teams move on while the No. 2 and No. 7 had two each. The three teams that represent this conference exemplify this to the highest order. That makes them the hottest team in the country. The Big 12 has its top three in Kansas, West Virginia and Baylor. The Mountaineers led wire-to-wire en route to an 83-71 win over the Irish. We’ll find out Thursday night, when they play Butler, fourth-seeded in the South, if they learned their lesson.

For his part, Martin is trying hard not to gloat after SC became the last SEC school to win its way to the Sweet 16 since the NCAA tourney expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

If the event were being re-seeded, I’d bump the Wildcats up to a No. 1 seed. He followed that up against Virginia by recording his second double-double of the season. After the final buzzer sounded, the Cavaliers had managed to score only 39 points.

In fact, of the 16 teams remaining, 15 landed in the top 16 spots of the Associated Press Top 25 at some point this season.

The Wildcats have won 11 of their last 12 games, including their NCAA tournament games against North Dakota and Saint Mary’s. And the Wolverines came into the NCAA tourney as a 7-seed. The Tar Heels are the biggest favorites in the Sweet 16, taking on No.4 Butler Friday night. Favorites combined for a losing 7-9 ATS mark in the second round games on Saturday and Sunday. Not only did I predict the Pac-12 would succeed, but I prognosticated they would have the most total wins by any conference in the 2017 NCAA Tournament. My reasoning: The Blue Devils were so stretched with injuries and Mike Krzyzewski’s medical leave and the ongoing thrill-ride that is Grayson Allen that it was impossible for them to achieve any consistency. No matter the sport, the conference wants to wear down all those who cross their path.

I broke one of my bracket-picking rules by getting overly enamored with what I’d just seen in a conference tournament.

With the second round in the books, the powerful ACC and its nine NCAA bids has been reduced to one school.

North Carolina’s Joel Berry II, Florida’s Devin Robinson and South Carolina’s entire team are some of those on the annual tournament roller coaster heading into the Sweet 16.

The rest of the top conferences fared much better than the ACC. Seeing as the conference underperformed in the first weekend, those doubts have every right to surface.