Up to three bids were stolen during the course of the week. For sure, Saint Louis' surprising run to an Atlantic 10 title and Oregon's late-season hot run to a Pac-12 championship shrank the bubble by two. It's also possible, or even likely, that Saint Mary's upsetting Gonzaga in the West Coast title contest also took away another bid.
That was not good news for NC State, who was living dangerously on the bubble entering the week. NC State won its must-win over Clemson in the ACC Tournament but then lost a potential bid-sealer when it fell to Virginia.
Most bracketologists are surmising that NC State was bumped out of the field when Oregon defeated Washington handedly Sunday evening. ESPN's Joe Lunardi was one of the first, dropping NC State out rather than TCU even though he had earlier had the Horned Frogs as the last team in the field. Others like USA Today and CBS Sports' Jerry Palm also have NCSU out of the field.
According to BracketMatrix.com, only 58 of 132 brackets (or 44 percent) have NC State in the Big Dance. Yet those who include NC State also have them comfortably in with an average seeding of 10.50, which would avoid the "First Four" games in Dayton.
ESPN's bubble watch summed it up well:
What's startling is that there's such strong agreement among Joe Lunardi and other purveyors of mock brackets concerning which fiveteams are competing for four available bids. Those five teams are:
TCU
Arizona State
Temple
St. John's
NC State
Which of these five will be left out? According to Lunardi, NC State will miss out because the Ducks took a bid off the board.
ESPN.com also included NC State as one of the toughest questions facing the Selection Committee because of its non-conference strength of schedule that is ranked No. 353 out of 353 teams:
Perhaps the most striking part of any bubble team's résumé this season is NC State and its No. 353-ranked nonconference strength of schedule (SOS) -- as in, the worst in Division I men's college basketball. Poor nonconference slates have at times been a death sentence for a team's at-large hopes, and coach Kevin Keatts and the Wolfpack are hoping that's not the case this season. NC State didn't just sit at home and play nobodies all November and December, of course. It beat Auburn and Penn State, and lost to Wisconsin. Vanderbilt didn't turn out the way it hoped, but the bottom part of the nonconference schedule was a complete joke. And even factoring all that in, it's still No. 353 in the country. If NC State misses out on Sunday, it won't be hard to figure out the reason.
Last year we did a mock bracket and was correct on 35 of 36 at-large teams, missing out on Southern Cal who was left out in favor of Pac-12 rival Arizona State. USC had a RPI of No. 34 on Selection Sunday, making it the highest ever ranked power-five RPI team left out as an at-large.(NC State’s NET is 33, which if treated like the RPI was would mean the Pack would set a new precedent.)
Among seeding, we correctly had NC State as a nine-seed. Overall, we were 40 of 68 on getting seeds right and were within one seed line on 61 of 68.
Of the other seven, one was missing entirely on Southern Cal and five others were off by two lines. Our biggest miss: we had St. Bonaventure as an eight seed and it ended up being one of the last four teams in at No. 11.
So with that said, here is our mock bracket:
Our first four teams out were: Temple, Indiana, Creighton and Belmont. Our last four teams in were, in order, Arizona State, NC State, St. John's and TCU, with the Horned Frogs edging out Temple for the last spot. We also believe that none of VCU, Washington and Ohio State should feel entirely comfortable either.
Selection Sunday starts at 6 p.m., and it will be a long wait while watching the brackets unfold region-by-region.
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