Now that we’ve reached the middle of February with only seven regular season games remaining it’s time for a word known only to college basketball fans:
Bracketology.
Bracketology has become a massive part of the college basketball experience with experts using the mountain of data available to project how the field of 68 would look if the tournament was tomorrow, as well as project what it will look like on Selection Sunday.
With the Gators right in the thick of things, it seems like today (February 15th–important to note as things will change quickly) was a good time to take a look and where things stand and what Florida needs to find themselves comfortably in the bracket.
For starters, let’s look at where the Gators sit in some key metrics starting with the NET, the NCAA’s official sorting tool. Currently Florida is 32nd which is…alright–but not exactly stellar. Teams in that range generally make the field–but many teams higher than that have been left out. The Gators look a little bit better in KenPom coming in at 30th and even better in another metric that the NCAA Committee uses–T-Rank (or BartTorvik). In T-Rank the Gators are 18th, something that won’t be enough to prop up their seeding on their own, but something that could catch the eye of the committee if they’re on the fence of whether to put the Gators on one side of a seed or the other.
As you’re probably aware, the NCAA sorts games into four separate quadrants in terms of how difficult they are. The Gators are:
2-7 in Quad-1
3-0 in Quad-2
8-0 in Quad-3
4-0 in Quad-4
Now, there are two separate ways you can look at this. On the positive side, the Gators are yet to take a loss in the bottom three quadrants which is extremely impressive and suggests the Gators haven’t taken a bad loss. In fact, there are only six teams in the country who haven’t taken a loss in the bottom three quadrants:
Houston
Purdue
UConn
San Diego State
Dayton
Florida
The five teams other than Florida are clearly in the NCAA Tournament picture–in fact, three are projected 1-seeds, so the Gators being in that group is a positive sign.
On the negative side–the Gators have not had many quality wins. When you look at other teams with nine or more quad-1 opportunities, the teams other than Florida that have only two wins are teams like UCF, Syracuse, LSU, and St. John’s–teams currently well outside the NCAA Tournament picture.
When you look at how the Selection Committee has selected teams recently they have generally been much more positive towards teams that have a number of great wins and have excused bad losses, and Florida’s resume is the opposite where they haven’t done much with their opportunities but have avoided bad losses.
While Florida’s resume isn’t particularly glamorous–that doesn’t mean they’re out of the field. In order to look where the Gators currently stand in the bracket I generally use Bracket Matrix, a composite of 106 of the best bracketologists out there. By using a composite you remove the biases that individual bracketologists may have and you can generally get the most accurate picture.
In terms of Bracket Matrix the Gators are in 101 of the 106 brackets, so it’s safe to say they’re pretty comfortably in the field right now. In terms of seeding, drum roll please…
They are a 9-seed. Remember that this is as of the morning of February 15th so things will move quickly, but it’s good to know the Gators are currently in the field and above the play-in games.
While I generally like to look at Bracket Matrix for a composite, I also do like to look at one particular bracket–Lukas Harkins of Heat Check. Over the last three years Harkins has proven to be one of the most accurate bracketologists in the country (something that’s also tracked by Bracket Matrix so you can see who to trust) so when I want to look a bit deeper than Bracket Matrix I look to him.
Currently Harkins has the Gators as an 8-seed, just higher than consensus. They would be playing Northwestern, with the winner going on to likely face the 1-seed Houston.
So, whether you want to go with the composite Bracket Matrix or Lukas Harkins–the Gators seem to be in the 8-9 right now. It’s somewhat of a positive to be in that position as you have some distance from falling out of the field, but it’s also not fun to stare down a likely matchup with a 1-seed in the second round. What would the Gators need to do to get out of that game?
For starters, they’ll need to avoid bad losses. Right now the only thing really helping Florida’s resume is the fact that they haven’t taken a bad loss, so dropping a game to Vanderbilt or Georgia would really hurt that perception. Would one bad loss knock them out of the field? No–but it could drop them into 11-seed “play-in” territory. The Gators will also have opportunities to rise. If they take care of business and win the games they’re supposed to against Georgia, Vanderbilt, and Missouri, they’ll likely “hold serve” while some teams around them drop. Of course, the Gators will also have opportunities for some big wins with Alabama and South Carolina still on the schedule, as well as chances that will arise in the SEC Tournament.
It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster to get here but the Gators find themselves in the NCAA Tournament picture as of this moment and it seems like it would take a fairly major collapse to find their way out of it. Right now there are opportunities to climb even higher in the rankings and if the Gators can both take care of business and steal a big win or two, something like a 5 or 6-seed isn’t out of the picture.
Thank you Eric.