It has been six years since Around The Corn got down and dirty with college basketball prior to an NCAA Tournament bracket being released, but the timing feels right to bring back one of my favorite segments I’ve created – the Cinderella Casting series.
In this series, we take a look at each of the small and mid-major conferences and their automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. I try to do this in its entirety before the bracket is released, and therefore assign a projected seed or range of projected seeding.
For those of you keeping score at home, I also assign a “probability” of each automatic bid becoming the next darling of the Dance, which ranges anywhere from “Good” to “Very Unlikely” (the sliding scale is, generally speaking, self explanatory).
Over the course of the next few days, you’ll see several similar articles published as the tickets continue to be punched over the course of this weekend.
Amidst the madness that is Championship Week, keep checking back to get a head start on finding your diamond(s) in the rough for this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Ohio Valley
Automatic Bid: SIU Edwardsville
Projected Seed: 16
Cinderella Probability: Very Unlikely
Welcome to the show, Cougars! SIU-Edwardsville, not to be confused with the SIU-Carbondale program which made six straight NCAA Tournaments from 2002-2007, will be making its first appearance in the Big Dance. The Cougars stormed through the OVC Tournament, winning each of its three games by a minimum of eight points, and punched their bid by avenging two regular season losses to Southeast Missouri State, the regular season conference champion.
The Cougars aren’t particularly potent offensively, and based on KenPom metrics, weren’t going up against the best defenses in the country this season, either (No. 355 in DRtg at time of writing). They’ll need to slow the game down and play good fundamental basketball to avoid being run off the court by the end of the first half. Brian Barone’s team was one of four “W”s for Doug Gottlieb’s Green Bay squad this season, which probably makes as strong a case as any statistic in terms of the likelihood of the Cougars to be this season’s Cinderella.
In short, don’t expect these debutants to the Dance to stay long.
