The 2017 NCAA Tournament is just around the corner, with the annual selection show set to air Sunday at 6pm. With their run to Saturday night in Brooklyn, the Irish injected some intrigue into a seeding process that was lacking much excitement for most of the year. Notre Dame was never in serious doubt of missing the tournament (even during their February slide), but for the vast majority of the season, the Irish lacked the top tier wins required to be considered among a top 16 resume. Knocking off Virginia and Florida St. in back to back nights began fixing that problem. We’ll have to wait until this afternoon to find out what the committee thinks, but let’s dive into where the Irish will likely land, what they might find once they get there. Then we’ll take a quick spin around the country at the key storylines of Selection Sunday.

General Bracket Desires

The most important thing that can happen for the Irish today is to find out that they are a top 4 seed. While the gap between a 4 and a 5 seed seems small, it makes a big difference in a few different ways.

Quality

First is the quality of the first-round opponent. The 5v12 matchup has been a well-documented horror show over since the tournament expanded to 64 (and then 68) teams. Reasons for this vary, but one of the main, logical reasons is that the quality of the tournament field starts to fall off very quickly once you make it into the automatic qualifiers.

Every year, there are a few automatic qualifiers that really deserve to be dancing and are dangerous enough to knock off a good, solid top 20 power conference team. As soon as you get past those teams, who are usually slated in the 11/12/13 lines, the quality begins to decline quickly. As a result, gaining seeding in the 5/4/3 lines is as much or more important than the fight for the final #1 slot.

Location

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, once you get into the top 16 teams, you become protected geographically in two different ways. If the Irish get the call as a 4 seed, they will become the top team of their “pod,” which will include 3 other teams (a 5, 12 and 13 seed) to make up the first weekend’s matchups. Each pod then is assigned a site for those games. You can think of setting the locations as a draft, starting with the #1 team, going all the way down to #16.

There are 8 first round sites every year, and this year includes sites in both Indianapolis and Milwaukee. When you add in the fact that there are less good Midwest teams than usual, getting a top 4 seed means that the Irish will more than likely be in Milwaukee. If they get relegated to the #5 line, trips to Orlando, Buffalo or Tulsa become much more likely.

The other benefit of being a top 4 seed is the protection from one of your first-round games being a home game for your opponent. Even in the case where Notre Dame doesn’t get it’s first pick of opening weekend sites, the committee still tries (no guarantee, but more often than not) to prevent putting the higher seeds at a disadvantage. This year, that means not playing Oklahoma St. in Tulsa, South Carolina in Greenville or something similar.

It’s no magic elixir for tournament success, but a top 4 seed goes a long way towards helping make your road a little easier, and should be top on the list of desires for the Irish today.

Irish Resume – Lack of Big Wins

So now the question is, will the Irish land in that coveted top 4 slot?

Up until this week, the story of Mike Brey’s 2017 squad was missed opportunities, especially when it comes to knocking off elite opponents. Squandered leads against both Villanova and Purdue in non-conference play that would have been very helpful right about now.  Near misses on the road at FSU, UNC and Louisville could have given the resume some heft that’s currently missing. Wins at home over FSU and Louisville we’re all you had to make the case that the Irish are a top 16 team.

Figuring out where the Irish fit requires starting at the top. If you turn on a TV set this week, you’ll hear about #1 seeds and the race for the last two of them, but we’ll have to cut deeper to get to the resumes where ND stacks up. So, we’ll start by slotting Villanova, Kansas, Gonzaga, UNC, UCLA, Oregon, Arizona and Duke at the top, since they’re all clearly ahead of the Irish.

3 Seeds

The next round of teams requires digging a little deeper. The Selection Committee can vary from year to year in how things appear to be valued, but we quickly arrive at the crux of a major issue: How do you balance the value of good wins vs. the cost of bad losses.

Florida St. is an excellent example. They are 3-1 vs. KenPom top 10 teams and 2-2 vs. teams between 11-25, but they also have 3 losses to teams below 50th weighing them down. How do you compare that to a team like Notre Dame who dispatched all of their bad opponents but struggling with the top end (4-8 vs. top 25 teams).

By way of comparison, at the tournament bubble, when the committee is deciding on which ~#40-50 teams get in and which don’t, the metric of “Wins over Top 50 opponents” has been floated repeatedly in years past. Similarly, in this case, it makes sense to use “Wins over Top 15-25 Teams” as a tiebreaker to decide who is a top 15 team. As a result, we’ll lock up West Virginia, Baylor and Florida St ahead of us.

4 Seeds

Now we get down to the final 7 teams with a shot at the top 4. We have 5 slots left, which means two are going to be left with a 5 seed (and playing one of the other teams on this list in the first round). The calls here are all close and could be argued in almost any way. I’ve included them in order of how I would place them, but anyone else’s interpretation is just as valid.

Keep in mind that Cincinnati and Kentucky are still playing today, with chances to move up (or down) based on the results. If this is the spot where you would like to lament the blown lead vs. Purdue, I fully encourage it. That result would be very useful right about now.

The Ugly Bubble

Much further down the seeding list, the comparisons are much less enjoyable. 22 leagues aren’t strong enough to send anyone besides their already decided conference champion, which means there are 46 slots available for the 10 conferences. We got down to #18 above, but we can realistically lock in 40 of those teams (basically everyone the top 10 seeds via www.bracketmatrix.com), including Michigan St, Northwestern, Marquette, Seton Hall, Xavier and VCU (even if they lose today).

That leaves six slots to play for and let’s just say the comparisons aren’t kind. The teams really hanging around for this discussion are Rhode Island (who locks up a spot with a win today), Vanderbilt, USC, Providence, Wake Forest, Syracuse, Kansas St, Illinois, Illinois St plus (if we’re feeling charitable), TCU and Georgia Tech.

Again, all of these discussions are fluid, but this is how I would slot those teams, and their records against KP top 10, 25, 50 and 100.

Like I said, ugly. Who would you move up and who would you leave out? Personally, I’m rooting for Rhode Island and Illinois St. to get in, but I’m not sure either really has the resume. I don’t think we should be rewarding the mediocrity that is Syracuse basketball right now, but if you had to play a game on a neutral floor in a week, I think I’d be taking Syracuse to beat either of the mid-majors trying to crash the dance.

ACC Effect

Obviously, this means the ACC is on the knife edge of getting 8, 9 or 10 teams into the tournament. Clemson and Georgia Tech fell off down the stretch and have basically no shot, while Syracuse and Wake find themselves having done either “just enough” or falling short of that low bar. Getting only 8 or even 9 teams into the tournament for the ACC would be a disappointment after the conversation centered on 10 or 11 for the majority of the year, but it’s still more than any other conference will send, and it’s the price we pay for having the best 8 teams all in the quarterfinals of what was a knock-down drag-out tournament of heavy hitters.

Long term, both Georgia Tech and Wake (as well as Miami and Virginia Tech) look to be on an upwards trajectory, while Syracuse, Clemson and NC State look to be falling. It will be interesting to watch how this conference evolves going into the next few years. Will BC make their way out of bottom dweller status? Can anyone consistently (more than one year) challenge UNC/Duke for the top slots?