![]() ![]() 1 seed of his fine career, gets the Boilermakers to the Final Four? As every good Boilers fan knows, the last time Purdue went to the Final Four was when Lee Rose led them there in 1980. Is this finally the year? Is this finally the year Painter, who earned the first No. Dominated in a way that showed you, again, why he’s going to be the nation’s Player of the Year.īut now the question arises, and the puckering around West Lafayette will commence: But on a late afternoon when Purdue’s backcourt of Braden Smith, Brandon Newman and Fletcher Loyer combined to shoot 2 of 20, Zach Edey dominated the way he always does. Think Purdue’s future opponents will notice? Answer: Yes. Purdue just took care of a preternaturally tough-minded Penn State team, 67-65, nearly blowing a late 15-point lead due to - this is a recording - the Nittany Lions’ full-court press. If you’re new here, this article from 2021 does a good job explaining how we look for upsets and what teams are more likely to pull them in March Madness. And in the coolest twist of fate we’ve seen since we started doing this in 2006, our professors’ home school (Furman) reached its first NCAA tournament since 1980, and drew a matchup with a team our model pegs as the most vulnerable giant in the field. Our quick reaction: This field looks thrillingly friendly to upsets - more like 2021 than 2022. These include cluster analysis, more sophisticated measures of team pace and comparisons to similar games from the past. With the help of our outstanding team of Furman math professors – Liz Bouzarth, John Harris and Kevin Hutson – we have incorporated all kinds of bells and whistles into our model that we’ve written about before but never fully deployed. Speaking of Slingshot, we’ve spiffed it up this March. So, below, you’ll find the list of the top-10 most likely first-round upsets according to our statistical model. But we wanted to get you some numbers right away. As always, we’ll have detailed analysis of every game with giant-killing implications in the lead-up to Thursday’s action, plus our annual lookahead at potential second-round Bracket Breaker matchups. The brackets are out! Here at Bracket Breaker Central, we’re geeking out so badly, we can barely keep up with the reams of ticker tape Slingshot is spitting out. The line of demarcation between legit title contenders and everyone else is fuzzier than ever, the season-long theme that there is a collection of good teams, but no great ones, not fading as the year reaches its crescendo. The one thing working in the league’s favor is that the rest of the country is much like the Big Ten. Penn State, the league runner-up, enters as a No. They locked three teams in the tricky 8-9 game - Iowa and Maryland on the 8 line, Illinois at 9 - and slid Michigan State and Northwestern in at 7. Indiana is the only other team on the high side of the bracket, seeded fourth. ![]() Is there any sign, after five days of hoops in Chicago, that the results will be any different this time around? The Selection Committee would seem to have its reservations. This year the conference will send more teams than any other once again. “Or are we going to maybe take our own advice at some point?” Apparently not. “Are we gonna give them 10 again, and then they all lose?’’ says a coach from another league. And yet since Michigan State’s title, the Big 12 has managed to secure three championships. The notion that the Big Ten’s quality equates to members beating up on each other, and pulverizing them into early March submissions, is negated by the Big 12, where the league slate is not exactly kind, either. Things happen in March, but the spotty history legitimizes questioning the validity of the conference’s perceived excellence. The league has had the odds in its favor - earning 139 bids from the 2001 postseason through last year. ![]()
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