Musketeer Madness

March Madness appears to be wide open for a Champion. Purdue is number one, again. But Purdue has barely won a lot of close games. And the winning scores for Purdue are mostly in the 50s and 60s for B10 games. 50s and 60s scores will NOT win a National Championship. Kansas was number two in the polls and now has lost 3 games straight. The last 2 weeks has seen a lot of the top ten lose games . Xavier has the best record of the BE but is not ranked in the top 10 now, thus the BE gets little respect from any team for the top 10 at the moment. This may be the best year for a dark horse team to come from no where and win it all. At this moment there is no great dominant team bowling over teams. By any one I mean there are only 10 to 20 teams that will be able to win 6 games and any one of those 20 teams can play just 6 strong games to take it all. No team yet shows true dominance.

I generally agree with this. In my opinion there have rarely been a single dominant team or 2. Usually there are 8 to 10 teams likely to win the championship but some years it was 4 or 5. This year is probably significantly deeper than 10, possibly 20+ but that may narrow significantly before the tournament begins. Some teams that started well are struggling and others have significantly improved. Will those new trajectories remain or will they revert back?

Lots of games have been close but that isn't uncommon. Looking back at tournament history, how many games were won by a shot or 2 or went to OT with the expected seed squeaking out the win? I would assume this is generally true during the season as well.

Teams that frequently squeak out close games do so for a reason. Often they shoot FTs well or are very disciplined and rarely make mistakes allowing them to close out in close games. They may also have excellent defenses that generate stops when needed.

Purdue is a very good team. They may however be the 1 seed that X would want in their bracket should we not be a 1 seed. Alabama would be the team X needs to avoid. I have not seen many of the other top 10 play.

I was at the UC-Alabama game, and believe that X can play with them. Agree that this year's tourney for X will largely depend upon their draw.

it is Jan 28 , 2023 at 4pm , and so far 4 of the TOP 15 ranked teams have lost today and the day is still young. There may be more by the end of the day. So far numbers 2, 12, 13, and 15 have lost. Likely to be more. No great teams.

Alabama just lost by 24 points 93-69 to an unranked team....yes X could play with Alabama lol

I meant I was at the UC-Houston game!

This week , i think, at least 8 of the top 25 lost their games. X will go down in the top 25 list. Jan 29th NET ratings from 23 to 27 with latest loss. Maybe a 6 seed, down from a 3 seed.

Bracketmatrix has X as the top 4th seed as of today the 29th

10 of the top 25 teams have just LOST their last game played this week. There is NO great team this year. Almost any team which gets in to the field of 68 could, might win it all. A little luck here or there . Scoring by all teams is totally inconsistent. A lot of low scoring games.