Bracketology 2020: Michigan, NC State and DePaul going the wrong way

March Madness is on its way, but at this rate, this week’s Bracketology Losers might need to win their conference tournaments to make it in.

The best time of the year steadily approaches, and by the end of this week, we will be just one flip of the calendar away from March. It’s a time when everybody pops out of the woodwork with their spin on bracketology.

And while the anticipation slowly brews for the general public, anxiety is likely starting to set in for a handful of fanbases that are watching their teams quickly give away their Big Dance tickets.

Of course, there’s always the conference tournament route. But teams really ought not rely on that as their means of ingress into the field of 68. Better instead to do the work throughout the season and leave all that stress for someone else.

Easier said than done for some teams.

It’s the time of year when the best clubs become “mortal locks” and the bad ones can finally be written off once and for all. (Looking at you, North Carolina.)

Still, that leaves a giant swath of the country that lives somewhere in the middle ground between those two poles. And while many teams are playing above their heads and angling their trajectories directly toward an at-large bid, others are heading in the complete wrong direction.

For this week’s installment of Bracketology Losers, rather than running down the unabridged who’s who of college basketball’s misery industry, we’ll focus on just five teams that have made their lives extremely hard over the past few days.

We start first in the Big Ten, where the past Five weeks haven’t been so Fab.