Selection Sunday is one of the best days in all of sports, and the heralded field of 68 teams for 2017 was finally revealed yesterday. Leading up to it everyone knew this would be anyone’s tournament this year because of the insane roller-coaster of a season, but for once, the number 1 line and the bubble seemed very clear cut. After the hour and a half of announcing team by team, there has been an uproar of seeding issues as well as teams who were left out.
Starting with teams who were left out, Syracuse is the biggest snub from the committee this year. For starters, there record is five times better than the one they got in with last year, when they shouldn’t have gotten in at all that year. Another debate point is the fact that Syracuse was the safest one on the predicted bubble ahead of Wake Forest, Kansas State, and Rhode Island, as well as first four out name USC. Every. Single. One of those aforementioned teams received invitations to the Big Dance, all except for USC with wore records than Syracuse, and the Orange has better wins than USC. The Orange also had a better conference record than Wake Forest, and beat them in the one-on-one matchup in early February. While Rhode Island was getting in either way on the automatic bid, something was just not right in that room.
Seeding-wise, I have heard many agreements with the surprise of all of the analysts last night in teams being seeded too high or too low. Duke is one in particular that shocked everyone, as they are the number 2 seed in the East region with overall number 1 seed Villanova. The top overall 2 seed (a.k.a the fifth seed overall) is never in the same region as the overall number 1, and it was later revealed that Duke was the number 7 seed overall, earning disapproving remarks from Seth Greenberg, Rece Davis, and Jay Bilas. Wisconsin and Wichita State have questionable seeds as well. Wisconsin was ranked in the top 25 for much of the season, and somehow they fell on the 8-seed, with Wichita State surprisingly on the 10-seed line, leaving south region 1-seed North Carolina some tough road blocks to the Final Four in Phoenix. Michigan, although definitely happy no matter what after winning the Big 10 tournamnet earlier in the day, deserved higher than a 7-seed, at the very least of 6-seed, which was stolen by Creighton in the Midwest region. I agree whole-heartedly with Jay Bilas, who says that Michigan was better than Creighton even before they won four games in four days.
There are many other controversies, including how Vanderbilt got in, let alone a 9-seed, Xavier getting the last bid in the field after a horrendous two months in conference play, Minnesota nabbing a 5-seed, and I’m sure you can come up with many of your own. All of this aside, this should be a very entertaining three weeks seeing how all of this plays out. Happy Bracketing!
The First Four begins Tuesday at 7p.m. live from Dayton, Ohio, and the first round of 64 begins Thursday morning. Tune into CBS, TBS, and TNT.
