March 7 Bracket Update

Not much new today. As a MAAC fan, I'm not surprised to see Monmouth, Iona and Siena among the final four at their tourney. My only disappointment is that Monmouth would've gotten and deserved a better seed (and deserved a bid last year). Iona is likely a 14 barring any upsets of the teams ahead of them.

Also reinserted East Tennessee State as the Southern Conference entry, replacing UNC Greensboro. We have ETSU and MTSU... is there a WTSU?

Checked in on the NCAA selection committee chat on Facebook today. I wasn't surprised that they didn't criticize having 16 seeds in the play-in game, but I was happy to see that I wasn't the only one there who thought it should be addressed. One of them (I forget which) made a rather silly statement that 16's feel like "we got in, we'll go play anywhere." That might or might not be true, and maybe some like the idea that they can claim to have won a tournament game with a play-in win. But I think it totally misses the point about fairness, and about having earned a tournament bid then having to jump through another hoop to get to Thursday/Friday.

They brought up another point: the last 12 games don't matter to them. That's long been a consideration but they said it's not on their radar. I was a little surprised until I looked at the bubble... the only bubble teams with more than 8 wins in their last 12 are the mid-majors that are about to get left behind, so clearly that doesn't mean squat. I didn't get to hear the whole thing but I think it was great that they took questions and hope they'll do this next year too.

Here's the update: