Villanova, Kansas, North Carolina, Gonzaga earn No. 1 seeds in NCAA Tournament

Let’s take a look. The victor generally takes a large percentage of the pool of entrance fees and then maybe a small award to the second- and third-place finishers.

– Iowa State being given a No. 5 seed despite winning the Big 12 Tournament and finishing their season with wins in nine of their final ten games. For some, that means an early start to the tourney and there will be two play-in games in the East region. That may be a nod to the long travel to Sacramento. In other words, more predictable teams create more predictable tournaments.

Why Villanova might win it all: The Wildcats were college basketball’s steadiest team all season. For mid-major teams, most of the last 15-20 games they played were against teams not good enough to make the NCAA Tournament field. And the next closest sites are nowhere close, in Kansas City and Memphis. They’ll face fellow nerd school Northwestern on Thursday. Your 5-12 upset is not happening here. The Shockers lost to Louisville, Michigan State and Oklahoma State. Though casual sports fans would much prefer teams such as Illinois State to go dancing over middling power-conference teams with myriad opportunities to pick up big wins throughout league play, that’s not how the current system – which relies heavily on the RPI metric and its top-50 wins – operates. The second seed Wildcats received the automatic bid for winning its conference tournament.

Early candidate for toughest region: The South, with North Carolina, Kentucky, UCLA and Butler the top four seeds. “If we’re able to have flawless execution and provide the experience we’ve outlined, it puts us in a great position to put in a bid and have the event return”. That can’t be right.

We already announced that Northwestern has made the field for the first time ever (it’s still really fun to type that, though).

Speaking of Duke, the ACC champs will be playing with objective being overlooked for a No. 1 seed.

But over the Brooklyn Bridge, back across the island of Manhattan to Madison Square Garden, a certain coach was busy extolling the virtues of his conference, which wrapped up its tournament hours before Duke beat Notre Dame in Brooklyn.

The Commodores didn’t just sneak into the bracket, they made it all the way to a No. 9 seed. The First Round proper will then start on March 16 and 17, and after a insane schedule of dozens of games, the big championship game for March Madness 2017 will take place on April 3. This season for the first round of the East Region the Wildcats will play in Buffalo, New York at KeyBank Center. Asked after the game if Villanova deserved to be the top overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, head coach Jay Wright said “probably”. They grab the victor of the play-in between Mount Saint Mary’s and New Orleans, then the victor of an intriguing contest between Wisconsin and Virginia Tech. In 2009, Florida State knocked off North Carolina in the semifinals, again opening the path for Duke.

The final play-in game features Providence and Southern Cal, the victor getting a trip to Tulsa to meet Southern Methodist. Before we get to this year’s picks, let’s take a little look at recent history and how it may assist you in filling out your bracket.