The 2019-20 NCAA Basketball came to an abrupt end. But how would the NCAA Tournament have looked had it been able to play all the way through?
There’s no nice way to put how NCAA Basketball fans feel at the moment. On today, Thursday of March 19, we’d be getting ready to watch the start of the Round of 64 games. Unfortunately, the coronavirus has altered many plans around the United States and the world, with the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament the least of our worries.
It’s been a superficial blow for the Busting Brackets site and our desire to provide solid coverage this postseason. As an aside, thanks to everyone who has read our work and listened to the podcast episodes all throughout this season and beyond.
To provide alternative coverage for the readers during this downtime, we created a mock NCAA Tournament. Our resident Bracketologist Lukas Harkins created one last projected field of 68, seeded from 1-16 in each region.
Look forward to a new @BustingBrackets NCAA Tournament project using these teams from @hardwiredsports's final bracket update. pic.twitter.com/74nUEpzZRE
— Joey Loose (@jloose128) March 16, 2020
What the rest of us do from here, in this exercise, is breakdown each matchup and predict who wins. With so many contributors on staff (48 total), we broke up into groups of three for each game. That’s because if more than three are picking, the odds of an upset occurring is small. Whoever gets the majority of selections moves on to the Round of 32.
This is far from a perfect practice, with so many writers contributing. It also doesn’t help that myself (Tristan Freeman), made mistakes when handing out game assignments to everyone participating, so apologies on my part for that.
The two mistakes were not having Xavier move into the round of 64, as well as switching 14 seeds Bradley and Belmont in different regions. But outside of that, check out who moves on into the second round, as well as who gets cut early on.