For the past two years, my March Madness brackets have been handicapped by my need to predict Georgetown to win it all. Call it faith in the team or a twisted sense of duty, but I’ve never been able to bet against the Hoyas. This spring, I won’t have to—every cloud has a silver lining. However, in the interest of helping us who feel a need to gamble on sports at all levels, I’m compiling a short bracketology for the NIT. Read closely: this is probably one of the only NIT previews available.
Negotiating the NIT bracket is more difficult than its NCAA equivalent for the simple reason that anyone less than a diehard hoops fan won’t recognize all of the names, even among the top-ranked schools. However, there are more than a few diamonds in the rough. For example, on Wednesday night #1-ranked Creighton faced off against #8 Bowling Green, with the Bluejays coming back from a 14-point deficit to win by two. #2 Virginia Tech needed two overtimes to put away #7 Duquesne, meaning that even if the Hoyas had beat #3 Baylor, we wouldn’t have had one last Saturday game at the Verizon Center.
Hoya fans should get a certain amount of pleasure from #6 Davidson’s joining them in the NIT despite junior guard Stephen Curry’s superhuman efforts throughout the season. The former Hoya-killer has been even more dominant from the perimeter this year, but this is partly due to the fact that Curry hasn’t been able to draw from as strong a supporting cast, and one-man teams tend to under-perform in tourney play. The Wildcats beat #3 South Carolina by a comfortable margin, but next they’ll face #2 St. Mary’s, who are coming off a dominant performance over #7 Washington State.
The lower tiers of the NIT are filled out with some pretty mediocre teams. If you’re looking for a silver bullet to really pull that bracket together, Baylor has, as Georgetown now knows, strong ball-handling and a good outside attack. #4 Kentucky also has a well-balanced offense, and after getting past #5 UNLV the Wildcats could go far.
As a rule, I’d stay away from any school with a hyphenated name or a better-known sister school. This means no Tennessee-Martin, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Washington State, or Kansas State.
I’m also wary of team nicknames that make no sense. As far as I know, there are no Aztecs in San Diego, nor are there rams in Rhode Island; also, the idea of there being hurricanes in Tulsa is downright ludicrous, given the city’s location 350 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. But who are we to judge—we’re named after Greek for “what.”
