Bracketology Losers: Lumps of coal this Christmas for the Pac-12 and SEC

Happy Holidays to all! But while Christmas is a time to be joyful, many teams around the country are letting out a hearty “bah humbug” as they sit and stew over Week 7 losses. Here are this week’s Bracketology Losers.

Can you feel it?

Christmas is right around the corner, which means conference play isn’t far behind. Some leagues have already begun their games and, not surprisingly, the results have been illuminating. And as we officially hurtle into these dark days of winter, the big picture of college basketball is becoming a little clearer every day.

So, with the year nearly coming to a close, here at Bracketology Losers, we are switching up the format a little bit. Rather than putting the spotlight on individual squads, it feels more appropriate to look at conferences more broadly. The reasons are twofold.

First, teams don’t exist in a vacuum. The 32 conferences of Division I are a sorting tool in and of themselves, even before the games get started. It’s a foregone conclusion that the vast majority of at-large bids will go to teams from the high-major schools, which for our purposes, include the so-called Power 5 (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC) as well as the Big East and the American. There are maybe a half-dozen leagues that will get consideration for the remaining at-large bids, a group usually comprised of the Atlantic 10, Mountain West, and West Coast Conference, with others joining in less consistently.

It is a safe bet that over 90% of the at-large bids will come from those ten conferences. As the season progresses, the leagues will settle into a hierarchy of sorts that will further inform the NCAA Tournament selection committee’s decision-making. Understanding how leagues perform as a whole is critical to predicting which teams will make the Big Dance.

Of course, highlighting the moving and shaking within each of them is important, too.

For bracketology purposes, conference records are a point of contention. Some, like preeminent bracketologist Joe Lunardi of ESPN, have argued that conference records should be used as a threshold for selecting at-large bids; in this school of thought, if a team can’t win at least half its league games, it hasn’t earned the right to go to the NCAA Tournament. Others argue that a team can do enough in its early non-conference games to paper over their later failures.

Regardless of where one lands on the subject, the fact is that the league schedule makes up at least half of the season. It’s closer to two-thirds in some cases. Since these teams will be compared against each other, it simply makes sense to group them together.

With that in mind, let’s jump into our first league—which arguably didn’t have a single loser in the bunch.