Sometime before 6 p.m. EST on Sunday evening, the NCAA tournament selection committee will email a completed bracket to CBS to unveil on the selection show. A look at some of the most difficult decisions that the committee will have to make between now and then:
1. Who are the No. 1 seeds besides Kentucky?
Big East regular season and tournament champion Villanova is the safest bet to join Kentucky on the No. 1 seed line. That leaves four other elite teams vying for the two other spots and the security of being spared from the possibility of having to face top-ranked Kentucky until at least the Final Four.
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The team with the best collection of wins is Duke (29-4), which defeated fellow No. 1 seed contenders Wisconsin and Virginia on the road, swept North Carolina and also owns victories over Notre Dame, Louisville and Michigan State. That should be enough to earn the Blue Devils a No. 1 seed unless the committee opts to penalize them for neither winning the ACC regular season nor conference tournament titles. The last time a team won neither and still got a No. 1 was 2009.
ACC regular season champion Virginia (29-3) certainly has a strong argument too even if its eight RPI top 50 wins aren't quite as impressive as Duke's 11. The Cavs own road wins over top 20 RPI opponents Maryland, North Carolina, Notre Dame and VCU, a sweep of NC State and single victories in Charlottesville against Louisville and Davidson. Their three losses are all against elite opponents too, though losses to Louisville and North Carolina came in the past week.
Semifinal losses by Duke and Virginia opened the door for Wisconsin (30-3) to potentially steal a No. 1 seed from one of them if it defeats Michigan State in Sunday's Big Ten title game. The Badgers won the Big Ten regular season title by two full games and boast a 17-2 record against the RPI top 100 including victories against Oklahoma, Georgetown and Michigan State. Their undoing could be the worst loss of any No. 1 seed contender, a loss at woeful Rutgers that was inexcusable even if it came without Frank Kaminsky.
The dark horse is Arizona, and it speaks to the strength of this year's potential No. 1 seeds that the Wildcats are a long shot as a 31-3 dual champ in a power conference. Arizona is an astonishing 17-0 against RPI top 100 competition including three victories against Oregon, two against Utah and UCLA and one apiece against Gonzaga and San Diego State. Their downfall may be losses to UNLV, Oregon State and Arizona State, easily the worst collection of defeats suffered by any elite team.
To me, Duke's plethora of wins against elite competition sends it to the No. 1 seed line and Arizona's trio of bad losses relegates it to the No. 2 seed in the West. The toughest choice is between Virginia and Wisconsin, and I favor the Cavs because of their quality wins away from home and their lack of any losses remotely as bad as the Badgers' loss at Rutgers.
2. If Wisconsin drops to a No. 2 seed, will it be slotted into Kentucky's region?
Competitive balance dictates the No. 2 seed in Kentucky's region ought to be the weakest of the four, but that's not how the committee traditionally approaches seeding. Its bracketing principles dictate it prioritize geographic proximity ahead of making sure the regions are equitable, meaning the strongest No. 2 seed would be sent to whichever regional is closest to its campus as long as the No. 1 seed in that region is not from the same conference.
That could be especially bad news for Wisconsin if the Badgers drop to the No. 2 seed line since Madison is more than 300 miles closer to Cleveland than it is to the next closest host city. Undefeated Kentucky will almost certainly be the No. 1 seed in Cleveland since that city is a shorter distance from Lexington than the sites of the three other regionals.
If Kentucky and Wisconsin land in the same quadrant of the bracket, it's a disservice to both. The Wildcats have earned the most favorable path to a Final Four by becoming the first power conference team to go unbeaten in the regular season since Indiana in 1976. The Badgers have earned a better fate than seeing Kentucky so early by dominating the Big Ten conference.
The committee does have a means of balancing the regions to an extent by ranking the teams on the top four seed lines from 1 to 16 and totaling each region's true seedings, but changes are not usually made unless the gap between the strongest and weakest region is significant.
Why would the committee value geography over competitive balance? The NCAA has long maintained that it would be doing a disservice to the fans if it did not. Students, alumni, the team and its travel party would spend more time and money traveling to games if their NCAA tournament games were regularly on the other side of the country. Furthermore, the NCAA notes, if the selection committee sent a strong No. 2 seed elsewhere to avoid being in the No. 1 overall seed's region, its draw could end up being worse because of it if the No. 1 overall seed were to get upset early.
Those are valid arguments, yet they don't hold up in a year like this when there is a clear favorite to win the national championship. How many Wisconsin fans would be fine with their team playing in Los Angeles, Houston or Syracuse if it meant not seeing Kentucky until the Final Four? My guess is most of them.
3. Does Indiana belong in the field?
An Indiana team that defeated Maryland on Jan. 22 and cracked the AP Top 25 the following day disintegrated quickly thereafter. The Hoosiers lost nine of their last 14 games to tumble all the way to the bubble, raising the question of whether a team that hasn't beaten anyone remotely relevant in six weeks belongs in the NCAA tournament.
The argument in favor of the Hoosiers is that few other bubble teams have a better collection of quality wins than Maryland, Butler, SMU, Ohio State and Illinois. The argument against the Hoosiers is a pedestrian 20-13 record, a dreadful non-conference strength of schedule and a dropoff in play during the second half of Big Ten play.
Indiana's array of 3-point shooters make it a potentially dangerous underdog if it makes the NCAA tournament, but its inability to defend or rebound is a major concern. The Hoosiers don't have guards who can stay in front of their man and lack a rim protector to erase mistakes, a brutal combination that has them last in the Big Ten in points per possession surrendered and 276th nationally.
Indiana is one of a handful of high-profile bubble teams this year, joining fellow name-brand programs Texas, UCLA and Illinois. My hunch is Texas has the best chance of that group to make the field and Illinois the worst with Indiana and UCLA somewhere in between.
4. What about Murray State?
Thanks to an unbeaten conference record and the presence of one of the nation's elite mid-major players in Cameron Payne, Murray State (25-5) appeared to be a threat to do some damage in the NCAA tournament. Alas, the Racers may have let that chance slip away last weekend when they lost to Belmont in a thrilling Ohio Valley Conference championship game, costing themselves the league's automatic bid.
Even though there has been a groundswell of support for Murray State to receive a bid over a middling double-digit loss team from a power conference, the committee would have to abandon its usual criteria to reward the Racers. Murray State only has one victory against an opponent in the RPI top 100 and that came against NIT-bound Illinois State. The Racers lost by 27 against Xavier in their only game against an RPI top 50 opponent and also suffered damaging November losses against Houston and Portland.
Murray State is good enough to play in the NCAA tournament and would be a far more exciting addition than, say, Ole Miss or Temple or Oklahoma State, but the Racers should brace themselves for disappointment. Drexel (2012) and Green Bay (2014) dominated their conferences, achieved far more in non-league play and still didn't hear their names called on Selection Sunday. More than likely, it will be the same for Murray State.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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