Lunardi's first bracket after Duke becomes favorite for 2018.
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KU a 1 seed, Big 12 with 8 teams, and Mizzou in the play-in game against St. Bonaventure’s.
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Holy smokes, the Big 12 with 8 teams? A conference sending 80% of it teams would be unprecedented.
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Won’t happen, 7 max.
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@BShark And the stock market won’t sit all time highs either lmao. ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY
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@wrwlumpy I like the 8 teams from the Big 12.
But this bracket doesn’t include the “try harder” team. Must be an oversight. And I guess OState can’t go anywhere without Phil Forte III.
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3 of the 8 are double digit and a 4th is a 9 seed. Not exactly a lot of strength in the middle of the pack.
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OU, UT, TCU, TTU, ISU, KSU and OSU are all bubble teams or worse.
- ACC has 5 teams in the top 4 seeds. 1 team below a 8 seed.
- Big XII has 2 teams in the top 4 seeds. 4 teams below an 8 seed.
Think we can all see who has the best conference here.
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Kind of what we have seen from the conference - lots of solid teams, few great ones.
KU as a one, WVU as a 3, Baylor as a 6, Texas is an 8, TCU a 9, Iowa State and Oklahoma are 10’s and Texas Tech is a play-in 11. As @Kcmatt7 points out, that means most of the conference is bubble quality teams, which means that the Big 12 could get 8 teams, but also could get only 4 if things break the other way if those bubble teams have an extra non-con loss, or slip up at home against a weaker team, or get swept by the top 3. Those teams are on the razor’s edge and could easily fall out of the field.
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Texas lost an exhibition game in Australia. They are marginally better then last season
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What was Lunardi’s final accuracy last year. 12% bracket picks right (or something like that)? I don’t believe anything this guy says is worth talking about literally up to the moment the brackets are revealed.
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@BeddieKU23 And played tight games in at least 2 others they played. Won one game by only 2 points.
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@wrwlumpy Yeah, I saw that. Lunardi is looney. At least he put KU as a 1 seed.
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Interesting. ESPN has Missouri as #23 in the pre-season poll and with chance to contend for the conference title. Lunardi, on the other hand, has MU in the play in game…go figure…
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The biggest upset of the whole thing is @elpoyo hasn’t commented yet!
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Let’s count our blessings…
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BeddieKU23 said:
Texas lost an exhibition game in Australia. They are marginally better then last season
checks to see Shaka is still the coach
Not too worried about Texas.
Coleman will be good in time but he isn’t going to be high impact this year.
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@wissox Chumming for sharks?
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BShark said:
BeddieKU23 said:
Texas lost an exhibition game in Australia. They are marginally better then last season
checks to see Shaka is still the coach
Not too worried about Texas.
Coleman will be good in time but he isn’t going to be high impact this year.
Gives the team more balance but he’s not a shooter or someone KU needs to worry about offensively. Going to be a nice 4 year player there if he sticks around.
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@BeddieKU23 He should stick around for 4 years. Not sure where he would go. Duke clearly backed off, KU probably did too.
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BShark said:
@BeddieKU23 He should stick around for 4 years. Not sure where he would go. Duke clearly backed off, KU probably did too.
He could always transfer if Smart doesn’t last the next 4. What am I talking about though they only care about football
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Yeah they put up with Rick Barnes for quite awhile and he put up better results than Shaka.
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Once again, dook will draw the path of least resistance in the tourney.
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I’m not picking on you sir (maam?)as lots of people say the same thing, but prove your statement! Everyone here makes these assertations that Duke gets a free ride every year and we get screwed every year. I want facts!
Now if you want to talk about, using @jaybate-1-0’s term of asymmetrical officiating favoring Duke in the Dance, well, I can buy that…maybe, almost for sure.
I’ve done this exercise before. No time to repeat it now, but maybe sometime in the future I can add more evidence to it, but KU gets a more favorable 1st and 2nd round site than Duke or NC. The thumbnail is that the NCAA hasn’t been putting both of those teams in NC subregionals. One year Duke gets the home cooking, the next year UNC gets the home cooking and Duke has to travel quite some ways. Meanwhile where have our first two rounds been? Oh, KC, Des Moines, Omaha, Tulsa, OK City. Nearly every year we’ve been in one of those places in our first two rounds. Those deliver lots of KU fans into the stands creating a home like atmosphere. You don’t have to fly there from Lawrence, a quick 3-5 hour drive away. Bang, home crowd advantage.
I know some will say Duke gets the easy path and we get the tough path. I don’t buy that either. Sure there’s been some years where we’re left whining, me included, but other years I look at our path with glee! Like last year. I had no inkling that Oregon was going to wax us in our home away from home. Last year was as sure of a FF for us as I remember in a long time. But we underperformed, OU overperformed whatever, but we went home nonetheless.
I would think the NCAA would like KU to be in the FF. We’re a blue blood, a star studded team, traditional, Wilt, Phog, Larry, Dean, Adolph, Danny, etc. We’re one of the favored programs. Of course you could argue the same for Duke, UNC and Kentucky.
Why isn’t UNC in the Champions Classic every year? They should be instead of MState in my humble opinion. They’re a true Blue Blood but that’s a whole other topic.
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The true Champions Classic should be KU, UNC, UK and UCLA. Arguably the four most storied programs in the game (sorry Indiana).
With the way that conference re-alignment has put lots of schools in the same conference, that’s the only way to create a non-conference pre-season field. Indiana is really the only school that would have a legitimate beef about not being included, but their lack of recent success is a good argument against their inclusion.
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In that case we have to include teams such as San Francisco, Cincinnati, Providence, La Salle and others that were very good at one time. There is no way to leave Duke out; whether we like it or not, it is one of the top 4 programs in the modern era. Except for last year, UCLA has not been that good recently and its glory days were a long time ago.
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If I were hired to engineer the tourney, I would want KU in the first two rounds in the Midwest to make sure folks fill seats for TV and hold some eyeballs during the worthless rounds. But I would also want to stack KU’s path with Bang Ballers to soften KU up in order to push KU out by the Elite Eight for sure. I wouldn’t EVER want KU in the Final Four! And isn’t my script pretty close to the drama performed the last few years?
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@wissox Why isn’t NC in the classic? I don’t think Roy wants to play us every third year.
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@Hawk8086 @wissox Partial answer is that NC would also play an in-conference team every third year (Duke), who they of course play 2-3 times as it is.
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@wissox Merely my opinion, which really doesnt matter. But please look at the bracket as it is written. Then compare the teams.
I actually dont agree with ref theory much. I would tend to say that KU has its share of some fav officiating experiences too. Dook does seem to get both, fairly easy tourney bracket, and some obvious ref calls, in my opinion.
I actually stay away from whining about the refs. If KU allows a game to be determined by the refs, they deserve to lose. This goes for any team.
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@truehawk93 Two Duke games stand out. Us and them in 86 final four. 26-14 foul count. That was in my opinion the best ku team besides 96-97 of the last fifty years or so. Then the other was the farce in 2015 which cost my 2nd love Badgers.
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@wissox That Wiscy team was so good!
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The Bucky loss to Duke was when the appearance of engineering overwhelmed the appearance of credibility of the tourney.
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@BShark One of my favorite teams in any sport ever. Ask 38-0 Kentucky how good they were! Those FF years for the Badgers helped me ease the sting of the two bad endings to KU seasons when they lost to WSU and Stanford.
