The expanded NCAA tournament and the deepest Big East Conference ever appear destined to result in the largest number of March Madness berths for one conference in history. Getting those teams into the dance is the easy part. The bigger dilemma is how to seed them.
With late-season swoons and one-game exits in the Big East tournament, both Georgetown and Villanova have fallen as far as they can without getting axed from the NCAA field altogether. But are the Wildcats (21-11) and Hoyas (21-10) as bad as they’ve been playing of late, or are they as good as they were earlier in the year?
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Officially, the selection committee no longer uses a data point that measures a team’s record down the stretch. ESPN.com bracketologist Joe Lunardi says common sense, however, argues that it’s a difficult point to ignore.
“There’s no way you could look at a Villanova or, for that matter, a Georgetown or teams on lesser slides at this point and say that they’re playing as well in March as they were in December or January,” Lunardi said. “I think that becomes more of a seeding question, and I’d like to see [the committee] spend more time and frankly be a little bit more accurate with seeding than we’ve seen.”
Lunardi predicts both the Hoyas and Wildcats will get double-digit seeds when the bracket is unveiled Sunday.
“Maybe the committee will send them both to Dayton [for the at-large play-in round],” Lunardi said, “and they can play each other.”
