When you get right down to it, the conference tournaments are essentially the first rounds of the actual tournament. Not winning the conference tournament means for several teams that they have lost their shot at the title. Of course, schools like North Dakota State, Longwood and Yale have all been eliminated already, for a variety of reasons (ineligible because they just moved up to D-1, not in a conference and not good enough anyways, a member of the Ivy league, which the regular season champion earns the automatic bid (yes, I included North Dakota State, Longwood and Yale in the same group for something, first time in history to my knowledge)), however the first real live tournament style eliminations start soon. In fact, they start frickin’ tomorrow.
The games in which teams could officially get eliminated are as follows:
Radford at Winthrop
Coastal Carolina at High Point
Charleston Southern at UNC Asheville
VMI at Liberty
Detroit at Wright State
Wisconsin-Green Bay at Valparaiso
Youngstown St. at Illinois-Chicago
Loyola Chicago at Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Eastern Kentucky at Austin Peay
Tennessee Tech at Murray St.
Tennessee St. at Morehead St.
Samford at Tennessee-Martin
And these games begin tomorrow. I’m hoping there aren’t many Youngstown St. fans reading, because I don’t like their chances. By the way, if you want some practice filling out brackets, I should direct you to the Name of the Year tournament. Go Johnny Moustache!
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