Championship Fortnight is upon us, and five teams have already punched their tickets. Meanwhile, a handful of teams are flushing their Bracketology tickets away.
To some, the weeks leading up to the NCAA Tournament are even better than the championship event itself. The drama of 32 conference tournaments is hard to resist. No matter what has happened during the season—well, to an extent—just about every team in the country has one last chance to put together a streak of Bracketology wins that would see them clear into the field of 68.
But on the other side of those wistful hopes are a set of regular-season champions living in terror that some plucky squad with a losing record will knock them off course. This is especially true for the so-called mid-majors, where the only realistic path into the Big Dance is through the automatic bid awarded to the winner of their respective league’s conference tournament.
Take, for instance, the Southern Conference. While the dreams of a #2BidSOCON were thought dead at one point in the season, Eastern Tennessee State has performed well enough throughout the year that they would be in contention for an at-large bid if they lost in the SOCON finals to one of the league’s other top teams. For squads like Furman and UNC Greensboro, the mission was clear: win the tournament. Unfortunately for both, the mission was a disastrous failure, as both were bounced in the quarterfinals. Wofford could still make things interesting with an upset of ETSU in Monday’s championship game.
There is also the case of the Missouri Valley Conference. Similar to the SOCON, this was a league with one at-large-adjacent squad (Northern Iowa) and a handful of talented teams ready to knock them off their mantel. But with the top three teams in the conference all falling in their first games, suddenly it is Bradley who will be filling out the MVC’s dance card.
While Loyola Chicago and Indiana State were never really in the discussion, Northern Iowa’s once-hypothetical at-large hopes are now directly under the microscope of the selection committee. We head first to Cedar Falls, where the Panthers will be on pins and needles as they await Selection Sunday.