Championship Week is here! In a few short weeks, we will finally know the NCAA tournament bracket and we will all toil over the brackets we are going to submit to various bracket challenges across many different sites. The NCAA Basketball regular season is over, and the second season begins for those teams who were not good enough to build a tournament-worthy resume. There will be 32 automatic bids into the NCAA tournament handed out over the next two weeks.
There are ultimately going to be upsets and bid stealers over these next two weeks. This is a time when it is no fun to be a bubble team. Those teams often find themselves sitting on the results of every game because a tournament win by a team who would not have otherwise made it will seal their fate. A lot of low majors offer their regular season champion an automatic bid into the NIT, that way if they get upset in the conference tournament, they will still be able to be rewarded for their excellent season.
Over the last few seasons, I have given you my educated predictions on who I think will win the conference tournaments along with a sleeper pick. It has been done with some minimal success as every year there are a handful of tournaments that are complete chaos where anything can happen. Richmond was nowhere near my radar of a team who could win the Atlantic 10 a season ago, but instead, they won and upset Iowa in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
I have a little different approach this season when it comes to picking my conference winners. I have successfully watched at least one full game of all 363 teams and I do feel I have a good idea of how the conferences and conference tournaments will play out. I still will only likely get 50% of these right again but it is still a fun exercise to begin the conference tournament season. These are going to be in order from the time the tournaments start.
I will give you the top seed in the tournament, and then predict a winner and a sleeper. A sleeper is any team outside of the top 3 that has what it takes to win the league tournament. All top seeds are current as of the start of play on February 26th. The Atlantic Sun is up first.