The first of the upcoming daily parentheses will be on Friday, with the first change to the topline for the first time in more than two weeks. Houston moved to the fourth seed after Florida’s loss in Georgia on Tuesday. The Gators are currently the second seed, sixth overall behind Tennessee.
This battle is not over either. Of those three SEC teams fighting for top seed, one of them will definitely make that team the number one seed.
Michigan cannot even be completely eliminated from this pursuit. The Spartans will have home games left with Wisconsin and Michigan before the Big Ten tournament. If Indiana surges, it will help them. The Hoosiers’ home loss is the only Quad 2 loss in one of the top seven teams in the bracket.
Top seed in parentheses
Find out the complete field of Palm’s Bracket and 68 on the Bracketology Hub.
Fight at the bottom of the bracket
At the bottom of the bracket, Baylor and Wake Forest are out and replaced by Georgia and Boise.
The bears have lost four of the last five, most recently in Colorado and fellow Babura Cincinnati. Baylor fell to 15-12 overall (games against Division I opponents only), falling 8-11 against the top two quadrants and 10-12 against the top three quadrants. These numbers rarely get teams on the field.
Wake Forest set a schedule for success four games ago. Demon Deacons has a road game at SMU, which is a good victory and could be three games against non-contenders. Well, they won the road game and lost others. These are the three worst losses of the season. They have fallen to 71st place online and it doesn’t eliminate them on its own, but it reflects the kind of season they had.
Missouri State Coach Dennis Gates is key to the Tigers going to the NCAA tournament from their winning SEC season.
Dennis Dodd
The new feature in the bracket is Georgia, where Boise defeated Utah with the aforementioned Florida victory and the previous eight wins. The victory over Mountain West leader New Mexico was another successive victory.
Georgia appears to exchange places around the cut lines of all brackets, along with Texas and Arkansas. Arkansas has surpassed the “last four” for the first time since early January. This is the first time Texas has appeared in the first four from consecutive brackets.
As always, but not always, I had to juggle to get BYU on the Thursday to Saturday road through the tournament. This was relatively minor as I didn’t need to change anyone’s seeds, but the Cougars are in the same pod as Houston. It doesn’t violate the bracket rules, but it’s still undesirable.
