For college basketball fans, you know that when the calendar flips over to February it’s time for bracketologists to start working their magic, projecting the NCAA Tournament field and making fans sweat over where their team looks to be situated.
Unfortunately for Florida fans, looking at bracketology hasn’t been a fun exercise so far this season, particularly before the Gators took down Tennessee and grabbed a marquee win they were desperately in need of. That took them from off the radar to back in the thick of things–but where exactly do they sit now? And what do the Gators need to do in the next few weeks to ensure a positive position on Selection Sunday?
A safe tool to use when it comes to looking at bracketology is Bracket Matrix–a composite of the top bracketologists out there. By using a composite the biases of individual bracketologists are (hopefully) washed out, and it’s a good tool to get a fairly accurate look at where teams currently stand.
According to Bracket Matrix (as of February 6) the Gators are not in the field.
They are also not in the first four out…
…or the next four.
Right now the Gators are the 9th team out of the field. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that the Gators aren’t in the field, though you might have thought they were a little closer than 9th.
Why is that? Well, when you look at the teams ahead of Florida–all of them have more quadrant-1 wins, the wins that the NCAA values the most. Currently the Gators sit at 2-8 in quad-1 games with one of those wins being truly elite (Tennessee) and one of them, while technically qualifying as quad-1, not being so elite (a road win at Mississippi State).
Florida needs to catch up, and hopefully surpass the teams ahead of them in the quad-1 win category. Considering the Gators have had a high number of opportunities, only 2 quad-1 wins to this point isn’t a positive on their resume.
Recently there has been some conversation about the Gators’ NCAA Tournament hopes that centers around the idea that the Gators just need to win the games they’re supposed to win–and that will be enough to get them into the tournament.
Will that be good enough? Perhaps not.
Right now the Gators have only three quad-1 games remaining. Those consist of Alabama on the road, Arkansas on the road, and Kentucky at home. Florida will be projected to beat the Wildcats at home, and they will be projected to lose the road matchups to Alabama and Arkansas.
If that happens, the Gators will finish the season 3-10 in quad-1 games. Will that be enough? Perhaps–but recent history will suggest that it probably puts them on the wrong side of the bubble.
To be clear–quad-1 wins are far from the only metric the Selection Committee looks at. However, when it comes to close decisions of who makes it and who doesn’t, such as the current bubble where Florida finds itself–it’s going to be a major determining factor. The Gators are 43rd in the NET and 39th in KenPom (and a similar range in other predictive metrics) so there is no one factor that the Gators can point to and say they’re an NCAA Tournament team, so the quad-1 column matters greatly.
By the way, Florida’s other games that remain outside of the quad-1 opportunities are against teams in the bottom of the SEC–Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, Georgia, and LSU–so the Gators will almost certainly have to sweep those games as if they were to lose any it would be a bad loss on the resume–something a team on the bubble can’t stand to face right about now.
There is one more opportunity for the Gators to stack up quad-1 wins, of course–the SEC Tournament. As things currently look, the Gators will likely enter the SEC Tournament in a spot where they won’t be comfortable at all with their NCAA Tournament standing. It could make for some extremely stressful games, particularly early in the tournament against a lower seeded team that might be able to knock them out of not only the SEC Tournament but the NCAA Tournament.
Florida has had plenty of opportunities so far this season and has been unable to cash in on most of them and it has led to the current situation–where the Gators may very well have to steal a game they aren’t supposed to win if they’re going to make the NCAA Tournament. When the Gators go to Tuscaloosa on Wednesday you can’t exactly call it a must-win game, but if the Gators aren’t able to take either that game or the road contest at Arkansas–things could start to get uncomfortable.
It’s going to be a wild ride to end the season, so buckle up!