Midwest Region:
My pick to make the Final 4:
1) Kentucky
Everybody knows. About half of people who have filled out a bracket on ESPN.com have picked the Wildcats to win it all. They have a nine deep rotation chock full of NBA level talent, with only one player under 6 feet five inches (Tyler Ulis, and he can play). They are 34-0 and the most athletic team maybe ever to step foot on a college basketball court. ESPN’s fivethirtyeight.com gives Big Blue a 41% chance to win it all. Last year, they assigned less than a 15% chance to the favorites. They have five players projected to go in the first round of the draft and have yet to really falter, other than barely scraping by a very solid LSU team. I am endorsing them as a lock to get to at least the Elite 8 without being down in a game after the first minute. Can they be beat? Yes. Any of the top four teams in the ACC (Duke, Virginia, Notre Dame, North Carolina) can beat them if they shoot very well from outside and keep their big men out of foul trouble. The same goes for Villanova, Arizona and Iowa State. None of those teams face them until at least the Elite Eight, and most of them will likely be knocked out by then. They are not indestructible, but they are the Death Star; it will take a perfect shot to blow up their quest for perfection.
Sweet 16 teams:
1) Kentucky- Cakewalk by the first two rounds for all the reasons listed above.
3) Notre Dame- Hot shooting and an improved defense will take the Irish past Northeastern and Texas in the second round after the Longhorns upset Butler.
4) Maryland- The Terrapins will avoid Valparaiso’s upset bid, then end Buffalo’s run to square off against Kentucky.
7) Wichita State- Cross state rival Kansas is overrated and heavily overseeded, and the underrated and underseeded Shockers will ride Ron Baker and Fred VanVleet right by the Jayhawks.
Upset Alert:
5) West Virginia
12) Buffalo
In case you did not know, people love to pick 12-seeds to beat 5-seeds in the NCAA Tournament, and there sure is validity to this trend. In the past 30 years, at least one 12-seed has pulled off the upset a staggering 27 times. This year, I think one of them will be Bobby Hurley’s Buffalo team, whose strong veteran guard play will overcome the unrelenting full court pressure of the Mountaineers. The play style of West Virginia is an uptempo bait into turnovers and easy buckets, and they are good at it, but the right team with level-headed guards and a former Duke point guard as their coach can exploit the Mountaineers track meet style of play.
6) Butler
11) Texas
Texas has one of the worst records of the at-large bids in the tournament because of their unbelievably tough schedule this year. Butler is a solid team, but the Longhorns are too big, too fast and too strong for the Bulldogs. Sometimes it is just as simple as size, and this is one of those games. The Longhorns have decent enough guards and have six players 6 foot 9 inches and above. That is too much size for the Bulldogs.
West:
My pick to make the Final 4:
2) Arizona
The other Wildcats have all the tools a college basketball team needs to win in March: great rebounding, good defense and good coaching. Many people think that Sean Miller is the best coach to never make a Final 4, and I agree. Fabulous freshman Stanley Johnson leads the team in scoring, and they are three or four deep, which is pretty solid. They have the size and athleticism needed to crash the boards, which is their best area of play, and it is hard to upset a team that gets second and third chance points on a lot of possessions and limits their opponents offensive rebounds. I am picking Wisconsin to go down in the Sweet 16 to North Carolina because of three things: Wisconsin is unproven against top competition (1-2 against Top 25 teams), UNC is athletic enough to neutralize Wisconsin’s athleticism on the wings and Wisconsin lost to Maryland (a very similar ranked team to UNC) and Rutgers. Arizona will finally make the Final 4 under Sean Miller to get him over the hump.
Sweet 16 teams:
1) Wisconsin- The Badgers can shoot, defend, dunk on you and have a great coach, which will carry them by the first two rounds and a possible upset bid by the Ducks of Oregon.
4) North Carolina- The Tar Heels will get it back together under the leadership of junior Marcus Paige and are a potent team if they stay out of foul trouble and learn to maybe, kind of, sometimes hold a lead (occasionally, maybe).
3) Baylor- I originally had BYU as the cinderella in this slot, but they lost after blowing a 17-point lead against Ole Miss. Baylor is very good defensively and a fairly deep team and will glide into the Sweet 16 off of Taurean Prince’s scoring talents.
2) Arizona- The team that may have the best chance to knock off Kentucky will storm through the West.
Upset Alert:
6) Xavier
11) Mississippi
I am going to take Ole Miss to knock off Xavier because of how bad the Musketeers are relative to their seeding. Also, Ole Miss is not too shabby either. They took Kentucky to overtime and lost by only three points, a pretty impressive feat. The Rebels will squeeze out the upset against Xavier after beating BYU on tuesday night.
East:
My pick to make the Final 4:
2) Virginia
The Cavaliers have built a reputation the last two years on their extremely stout defense under coach Tony Bennett. They have star power with Malcolm Brogdon and Justin Anderson and are one of the strongest and most powerful teams in the nation. The real secret to their success, though, is their management of the pace of play. The Cavaliers have held their games to a retirement home style pace, averaging 58.9 possessions per game. With a 40 minute game and a 35 second shot clock, that is an amazingly small number of possessions. Bennett’s squad also gives up a nation best 50.3 opposing points per game, another staggering number. The best defensive team in the United States will be an extremely tough out in the tournament, and I expect them to absolutely lock up Villanova in the Elite 8, even with the Wildcats offensive prowess. Otherwise, the East is a pretty tame region. Everybody should win who is supposed to win, other than Providence (more on them in a bit)
Sweet 16 teams:
1) Villanova- The Wildcats are one of the best offensive teams and have the best starting five in the nation. LSU could pose a threat to them, but otherwise, they should glide through to the Elite 8.
5) Northern Iowa- Seth Tuttle does everything for the Panthers. He leads the team in points, rebounds, assists, minutes and field goal percentage, and he will carry them until the Sweet 16, when they will be overpowered by Villanova.
3) Oklahoma- Buddy Hield and the boys will put in work for the Sooners until the round of 16, when Virginia’s defense will be too much for them. Hield will score single figures, and they will go down.
2) Virginia- The defensive intensity will be ratcheted up even more for the tourney, and they will be much improved offensively when Justin Anderson’s left hand presumably gets healthy in the round of 32 or Sweet 16.
Upset Alert:
6) Providence
11) Dayton
Dayton was the biggest surprise in last year’s tournament, and they returned a lot of the same players from last year. The Flyers will soar past Boise State in the play-in game and then proceed to obliterate the Providence Friars in the round of 64. The Friars are heavily overseeded; they should be about a nine seed based on their record, strength of schedule and notable wins and losses. They lost their best player from last year and are not nearly as good without the scoring of Bryce Cotton, who averaged more than 40 minutes per game last year before the Friars lost him to graduation. The Friars will be punished for being this highly seeded by the belles of last year’s ball.
South:
My pick to make the Final 4:
1) Duke
The Blue Devils won the prize of last year’s recruiting scene by landing last year’s package of Tyus Jones and Jahlil Okafor. They also quietly pulled in Justise Winslow and Grayson Allen to complete their rotation for this year. After the expulsion of Rasheed Sulaimon from the team after a loss to Notre Dame midway through the season, the Blue Devils went on a tear, beating everybody the ACC has to offer and doing it in style. Under the leadership of senior point guard Quinn Cook and under the offensive game of Player of the Year candidate Okafor, the Blue Devils will recover from their loss against Notre Dame in the ACC tournament semifinal and push through to Coach Kryzezewski’s twelfth Final 4 during his tenure as head coach in Durham. Gonzaga is a very good team, but I have them going down to Davidson in a historic upset in the round of 32. The other other Wildcats (Davidson) are a team that will surprise a lot of people with their best backcourt since Steph Curry graced the campus, and they will bounce the Bulldogs, who lost to BYU near the end of the season.
Sweet 16 teams:
1) Duke- The Blue Devils will shoot well from outside and feed the beast down low to battle their way into the Sweet 16.
5) Utah- The Utes have had a mini resurgence after their mid-season crisis and will ride that wave all the way until they square off against the boys from Durham.
3) Iowa State- The Cyclones are one of the best teams in the tourney and just won the Big 12 championship. Fred Hoiberg’s squad is clinical from downtown and have their own monster in the post (Georges Niang from Methuen, MA)
10) Davidson- The Cats have their best squad since the babyfaced assassin took them deep in the tourney. Expect the unexpected from them.
Upset Alert:
4) Georgetown
13) Eastern Washington
This is not so much a compliment to Eastern Washington as it is a slight to the Hoyas. Georgetown does not deserve a 4-seed in any way. The committee got their seeding wrong, and even though the Big East was probably the third best conference in basketball this year, Georgetown still does not have enough quality wins to have proved much of anything. The Big East did fly under the radar this year (mostly due to their lack of a television contract with ESPN, a massive blunder by the conference), but not so much that Xavier deserves a 6-seed and Georgetown deserves a 4-seed. Georgetown played tournament bound teams 16 times this year and posted a 6-10 record during those games. Not good. The Hoyas have been in a slump the past couple years and do not have nearly the same type of players they had when they were making Final 4 runs with Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert. Eastern Washington also has upset potential. They shoot 40.2 percent from the three point line, good for 9th nationwide. These two Big East teams could very well prove me wrong, but I seriously doubt it at this point. Eagles roll after shooting 52 percent or better from downtown in Portland on Thursday. Write it down.
Final 4:
1) Kentucky v. 2) Arizona
I already wrote extensively about these two teams, so just for a quick recap: Kentucky is humungous, athletic, quick in transition, high flying big men, plethora of NBA draftees, scary shot blockers, great guards and good not great outside shooters. Arizona is larger than most teams (but not Kentucky), great on the glass, athletic on the wings, good defensively, can shoot, and has the ability to run. In the Wildcat showdown, I would give the southwestern cats a 30 percent chance to win and the southeastern cats a 68 percent chance to win. The other 2 percent I give to a ten overtime game in which the benches are emptied after extensive foul trouble, and we finally get to see Kentucky’s Brian Long double and maybe even triple his career point total as a Wildcat! I personally am rooting for option three.
1) Duke v. 2) Virginia
This game is basically a coin flip. Duke beat Virginia at home by six points on Jan. 31, but the game was pretty close. My idea for how this game would go would be something along the lines of this: If the point total for the game is 119 points or over, Blue Devils roll; if it is less than 119 points, Cavaliers win. It is all about tempo in this game. The Blue Devils love to score and will win if they do it at a high clip. Virginia, as I mentioned above, wants to slow it down, make you use the whole shot clock and then take a low percentage shot against their rigid defense. One of these teams will be able to have their way in the tempo competition, and whichever one wins that battle will win the war. I think Duke finds a way to do it again, just as they did in Charlottesville at the end of January.
The National Championship:
1) Kentucky v. 1) Duke
I have said pretty much all I can say about these two teams. The Blue Devils have as good a chance as anybody to beat the Wildcats, who are very heavily favored to win it all. The phrase “as good a chance as anybody” though, carries as much weight as you think it does. Basically, Duke could probably beat Kentucky 2, 3 or maybe even 4 times if they get lucky out of 10, but the NCAA tournament does not have any “best of” series. In one game, I am putting the piggy bank and the box of hot wheels all on Kentucky. They are such a loaded team that they will be hard to beat when it is all on the line. Even if one, two or three players choke and fail to perform well, coach John Calipari has the freedom to yank and replace up to four players on the court at a time. Coach K only has the freedom to sub in three players, and two of them are shooting guards. Jahlil Okafor, Amile Jefferson and Justise Winslow would have to keep themselves out of foul trouble against a rotating cast of four 7 footers. Too tall, too big, too deep. Duke could maybe win, but the odds are stacked against them.
Edmund Geschickter can be contacted at [email protected]
