Bracketology 2020: Louisville, West Virginia and Stanford among biggest losers

Some teams are playing themselves out of good seeding, while others look to be giving up their spots altogether

By this point of the season, you already know what Bracketology Losers is all about. This is the definitive list of the teams that did the most damage to their NCAA Tournament resumes over the course of the past week.

These next few weeks are going to clear up misconceptions about some teams and further muddy the perceptions of others as the bubble moves and shifts and shrinks. But one thing is for sure: as teams play their way down the ladder, we’ll be here to document the fall.

Without further adieu, let’s jump right into things, starting with a team that went out of its way to cede the top spot in the ACC.

Louisville (21-5, 12-3 ACC)

Of all the teams near the top of the NCAA Tournament seed list, the Cardinals easily had the worst week. It’s one thing to lose two games in a week. But with Louisville trying to lock down a spot on the two-line, consecutive losses to Georgia Tech and Clemson have made Chris Mack’s job harder.

The losses sent Louisville outside the Top 8 of every major metric. As of Sunday evening, the Cardinals ranked as high as #9 in the NET and BPI, while Jeff Sagarin rated them lowest at #17.

As for their actual wins and losses, Louisville is still hanging their hat on the win over Duke in Cameron Indoor. Road wins over Notre Dame and NC State qualifies as Quadrant 1 victories, but this team has yet to register a true marquee victory outside of the game against the Blue Devils. A home win over Michigan is probably their second-best victory, though it still counts as just a Quadrant 2 game. (Note: The Wolverines were ranked #31 at the time of this writing, just one spot away from moving into Quadrant 1 territory.)

All in all, Louisville does have a good body of work and, most importantly, they don’t have any truly bad losses. That said, the defeats they incurred this week may have knocked them out of the conversation for a #2 seed, with schools such as Duke, Dayton, and Maryland currently tightening their holds on three of those openings.

Our next team had two big opportunities to stake their claim to that fourth vacancy, but like Louisville, they went 0-for-2 on the week. Unlike Louisville, this team’s opponents are both virtual locks for #1 seeds in the Big Dance.