NBK Update: Selection Sunday AM

Well, we’ve sprung forward, lit a fire, and have a pot of coffee at the ready.  Selection Sunday is finally here!   With just a few hours to go before Greg Gumbel starts revealing the field, let’s see where we are with the Never Been Kissed after an epic Saturday of basketball.

NBK Standings for action through Saturday night
NBK Standings for action through Saturday night

We start with the good news here in the NBK.   For the first time ever, Stony Brook is going dancing!   At home in their beautiful new building, the 4,000 Seawolves fanatics in attendance were treated to the benevolent demonic possession ofJameel Warney.  The 6’8″ senior was a One Man Seawolf Pack (Wolf School?) with 43 pts, 10 reb, 4 blks on a day when his teammates could not get anything else going.  See.  Wolves.  See.  Wolves.

Hawaii is going (hula) dancing!  The Rainbow Warriors got by Long Beach State to take the Big West final late Saturday night.  With Bows big man, Big West Player of the Year, and Jimmy Chitwood look-alike Stefan Jankovic largely contained, Aaron “Juan” Valdes led a balanced attack with 14 pts, 5 reb and a pair of steals.

Stephen F. Austin is going (line) dancing!  The Lumberjacks did what they do, forcing Texas A&M-Corpus Christi into 20 turnovers to win the Southland going away.  SFA is sure to be a favorite upset pick and human interest story, as the Lumberjacks’ intrepid leader Thomas Walkup really honest-to-goodness looks like a Lumberjack.  He is the Brawny paper towel guy.   And in an age when the small-ball Golden State Warriors are re-writing the records books, the Jacks are the giants of NCAA small-ball: they have won 22 straight with the tenth-shortest lineup, per Ken Pomeroy’s Average Height metric.  For all these reasons and their solid #37 KenPom, the Jacks shoot to the top of the NBK rankings.

Welcome Cal St. Bakersfield to the NBK!  Diminutive Dedrick Basile led the charge for the Roadrunners with 18 points, dropping an Acme anvil on the head of New Mexico State and taking the WAC championship.  The ‘runners boast the #25 KenPom defense and  6’9″ shot-blocker Aly Ahmed and could give some unsuspecting team fits next week.

Arkansas-Little Rock advanced to the Sun Belt #FunBelt final.  The Trojans overcame an epic performance from Louisiana-Lafayette‘s Shawn Long — 25 pts, 7 reb, 4 ast, 3 blk — in Saturday’s semi.  Long might be the best rebounder you have never heard of.  Here’s hoping we get a chance to see him in a postseason tournament somewhere.

Well that was fun.  Now onto the bad news.

The Akron Zips fell on Saturday to Buffalo in the wiggity WAC Final, banishing them to NBK gray and relegating them to the NIT.  Akron relied heavily on the three-pointer this season, and can take comfort in knowing they did not die by the three (39.5% in the loss).

The Bubble got bubblier last night for a couple of heretofore NBK stalwarts:

All this talk of bubbles and scrubbing and Joe Lunardi has me suddenly feeling under the weather.  Let’s move on.

Joey Brackets puts WAY more time into this than we at WAB NBK HQ, so we take his word and drop Monmouth and South Carolina to the bottom of our rankings as we await today’s movement and the committee’s final decision.   Apparently you now can bet on the number of teams Joey Brackets correctly predicts, and the line is 66.5 out of 68, so the Hawks and Cocks are hoping like hell to be within Marge N. O’Vera this evening.

To balance out Bracketology Bias, we have added the Bracket Matrix predictions to this edition of the rankings.  All good an interesting stuff, and all moot come 4:30 PM Central.