For those of you new here, Week 1 will give you a full breakdown of what we’re doing.

Now that we’re 7 weeks into this thing and teams have collected over 20 data points from individual games things are starting to settle in a bit. There are 8-9 teams that are oscillating from Elite to Great to Solid, with Nebraska emerging of latest to toe the line. Vandy is back, Virginia has faded, but overall we’ve been looking at a group with Arizona/Duke/Michigan pacing this thing for a while now. Iowa St/Houston/Gonzaga/Florida have been the next tier with a few others joining/fading. That to me looks like the top two tiers in the sport, with 3 in tier 1 and another 4 in tier 2. The one additional point I’d like to highlight is the nature of this thing not being a power ranking but a stylistic analysis of historical results. The key there would be teams like Michigan St and Illinois who from a ranking perspective are higher up than teams positioned better than them on this graph. The reason I keep harping on is vulnerabilities. Michigan St on offense and Illinois on D are both weak, which represents a reliance on one end of the floor. There have been teams able to overcome that and go deep, but with less reliability than the balanced teams like Vandy/Florida/Nebraska. That is what we’re doing here. Pointing out, with historical proof, that teams that rely on one end of the floor have a vulnerability that can crop up and burn them in a single elimination tournament.

Week 7 Thoughts:

The juggernaut tracker is off the graph as Michigan continues to be below that marker, as well as Arizona. This is a rare territory that only 5 historical teams have ever met entering the dance, so it’s not shocking they weren’t able to sustain that kind of efficiency. We also have to mention Virginia as we gassed them up the last couple of weeks, but they have faded hard as defensively they kind of regressed back to maybe who they really are. Vandy was able to reverse its fortunes as they stormed back into Great territory after dropping back-to-back games. UConn fans surely have to be realizing what we’ve been saying here for 7 weeks, as the offensive struggles are clearly an issue. They haven’t lost yet, but the Big East isn’t offering up tourney level challenges very often, and they’re still struggling. Illinois fans find themselves in the same scenario but on the other end, and while they’re playing well and are hot right now that weakness is still there. I’m also looking out for Kansas, who has slowly been creeping toward serious contender status with Darryn Peterson hopefully back and healthy for a big couple of days with Texas Tech and BYU on deck. Things are starting to settle in, but these teams aren’t done evolving, so we’ll continue to track and see you back here next Friday. Until then, enjoy the hoops.