Might some votes be shifting in the poll I posted a while back? Go vote if you haven’t! And…most of you haven’t 😉
One cool thing about the bracketing restrictions, aside from opportunities for fans to travel reasonable distances to their team’s matches, is you can objectively judge each conference’s performance. Each conference has the opportunity for all of their teams to make the Sweet 16 (of course, they don’t all have that opportunity, but each one individually does). And the Big Ten ‘pert near ran the table.
No surprise at all to see Penn State, Nebraska, and Minnesota in the round of sixteen — any loss among them this early would have been a jaw-dropping shock. Purdue, likewise, over the slightly over-seeded Florida State Seminoles can’t have busted too many brackets (I did have Florida State there, but I had them subsequently going out in the next round). And for Ohio State, it’s get ’em next year despite a beatable second-round opponent in Kentucky.
The big party crashers are the Michigan schools, of course. They shot my bracket pretty much to hell. The Wolverines took a hard-fought, back-and-forth match with Tennessee before the surprising upset of Final Four hosts Louisville. The Spartans pretty well did likewise, by squeaking past the San Diego Toreros in five and then having a much less difficult time against pod hosts (and, oh yeah, defending national champions) UCLA. They now face each other in Berkeley in the Sweet 16, a match that guarantees at least one unseeded team will be in the Elite 8. And of course it also means the Big Ten’s run of success won’t continue unimpeded, as there are (at least) two B1G-on-B1G matches next weekend. I doubt any of those teams actually care about ‘league pride,’ but who better to go out against than your own conference-mates.
I think this year is as good as any to see an unseeded team make the Final Four. It’s never happened (the field was first seeded in 1997), but with the Michigan/Michigan State match ticketing one team to the regional finals, Purdue playing a team they know well in Minnesota, and Wichita State the Cinderella darlings of the tournament playing as well as anyone, there’s a solid chance one of them makes it Louisville. If you’ve been reading, you know who my favorite of the lot is and it’s not that I have anything against Minnesota, USC, Iowa State, or Stanford (quite the opposite, really), I just think it’s a lot more fun when someone who isn’t a huge powerhouse makes the championship round.
As up as the Big Ten was, that’s how down (almost exactly, really) the West Coast Conference was. While it is a zero-sum game, the Big Ten’s gain wasn’t the WCC’s loss per se — the two conferences never met in the first two rounds, and in fact couldn’t meet in the first two rounds. There existed the possibility that 13 of the Sweet 16 could have been from one of those two conferences. Weird. Anyhow, Santa Clara and Loyola Marymount played like they were two of the last at-large teams in the tournament, which they surely were. Santa Clara were badly overmatched by an angry Hawaii team, and LMU likewise against Western Kentucky. San Diego ran into the aforementioned Michigan State Spartans, but Pepperdine was the real surprise. Facing a Dayton team they figured to match up with pretty well, they went up 2 sets only to lose the match in the fifth set decider. The St. Mary’s Gaels won their opener against San Diego State in an entertaining contest, but then had little chance against a high-powered USC team who beat them in straight sets. Only BYU remains in the tournament from the WCC, and they haven’t exactly been tested yet, dispatching with New Mexico State and Oklahoma to earn their ticket to Omaha.
It’s been mixed fortunes for the Pac-12. Stanford and USC have hardly been challenged in either of their respective first two matches, with both teams winning six straight sets this weekend. Stanford should solidly outclass Iowa State in their Sweet 16 matchup, and as far USC/Wichita State…well, we’ll wait and see. Oregon also won two sweeps this weekend, making a pretty good team in Dayton look impotent in round two. Washington, of course, had a tougher road. I expected Central Arkansas to give them a slightly harder time of it in round one, but even though they won that match in an easy sweep, the 5-setter against Hawaii was a barnburner that could have gone either way. They may actually have an easier opponent in the Sweet 16 in Nebraska than they did with Hawaii in the round of 32. No one expected much of Cal or Arizona State, but UCLA getting knocked out by Michigan State sure wasn’t the plan. I didn’t watch any of that match, because of the obnoxious ‘Announcer Man’ working the stream (and yeah, I could have muted the sound, but I really hate to do that…I love the sounds of the ball being swatted, the referees’ whistles, the crowd roars, the grunts of effort from the athletes on the court, it’s all part of the atmosphere), but reportedly the Spartans didn’t have much of a hard time against the Bruins. And likewise the Wolverines with a harder match against Tennessee than they had with Louisville. The Big Ten is here to play, people.
The Big 12 (*cough*….nine) and the Southeastern Conference have both done okay so far. No one expected too much out of any teams from these leagues, aside from Texas, and Texas haven’t really been tested. The committee was surely glad for Texas A&M’s offseason move to the Southeastern Conference, as it allowed them to pod TAMU in with UT in Austin (previously, TAMU was in the Big 12 and couldn’t have been sent there). These two leagues meet in the Sweet 16 with their respective best teams as Texas battles Florida in the Austin regional.
It’s rather remarkable that only one of the four regionals has all four seeded teams making the regional semis, that being Omaha. I still see Oregon as the heavy favorite to emerge. Of course Penn State still has an easy road in West Lafayette, though as they’ll be guaranteed to face a conference opponent in the Elite Eight (assuming they get past Kentucky), it’ll be a fascinating matchup between two sides who know each other well. I could honestly see any of the four teams coming out of Austin. I picked Florida before the tournament, so what the hell, I’ll stick with ’em. Stanford are clearly the favorites in Berkeley, going up against a young Iowa State team and then whichever school emerges from the battle of the Michigan teams. I don’t see anything stopping a Penn State/Stanford final, but I don’t see all, so it’ll still be exciting to watch.
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