Since we last spoke, Creighton has gone on a crushing assault and vaulted to the top of the Big East standings, at least as they are expressed in KenPom ratings. Joey Buckets has taken notice and elevated them to a 3-seed, meaning if the tournament started today they would be favored to make the Sweet Sixteen. March approaches rapidly.

NC State did themselves and America a favor by beating Duke, which served as a vinegar bath to wash the stink off the Pack losing to Boston College earlier. They then hung with Florida State but could not get over on the Noles. Buckets has them as the very last team in the field.

For our automatic qualifiers: the shine has come off the Southern Conference of late, as Furman dropped out of our rankings completely and UNC Greensboro dropped a bit. ETSU remains in first but margins are slim. This should be a conference tourney to watch. UC Irvine has strung together four straight wins and stands to win their last three to have a head of steam going into the Big West tourney. Hofstra has (have?) a series of convincing wins behind it (them?) and have seized control of the Colonial. And then there’s Winthrop, coming up small in the Big South. A horrific home loss to woeful #322 Hampton puts the adorable red-head on the brink of dropping out of the NBK.

Furman illustrates the cruelty of math by dropping out of our rankings following a win, a tepid one-pointer over Wofford. SMU lost an OT thriller to Houston that was math-friendly before Tulane and Tulsa delivered the right-left combo to knock them from the NBK.

Checking out the movers and puckerers in the Never Been Kissed, those schools that have not made the Sweet Sixteen since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

Interesting happenings this year in the Southern Conference (SC in the grid below), where East Tennessee St grabbed the lead and jumped +10 in KenPom rankings. Joey Brackets has the Southern as a two-bid conference at the moment, with Furman projected as an at-large to join ETSU. Sandwiched in between is UNC Greensboro. Wofford losing Fletcher McGee and taking a step back has created an interesting void in the Southern.

Akron broke a two-game losing skid by beating Eastern Michigan. In the KenPom math-don’t-care world, they continued to slide in the rankings while squeaking out the win. The Zips thumped Bowling Green in their next matchup, so maybe they get things rolling again.

Winthrop barely beat lowly Longwood then lost to conference contender Radford to accelerate their slide. Radford is now one game back in the conference standings.

How about Colgate? I know nothing about the toothpaste stalwarts, so that is not a rhetorical question. So seriously: how about Colgate?

February is upon us, with March not far off. So it’s time for our semi-occasional regular look at the schools that have never made the second weekend of the NCAA tournament, never made it to the Sweet Sixteen, never been kissed (NBK). We started the NBK several years ago to track Saint Louis University’s progress or lack of same toward making their first ever Sweet Sixteen. With tonight’s loss to Duquesne, the Billies have a telescopic view of the bubble and are therefore not currently in contention. The dry spell seems destined to continue.

We’ll start ranking this year’s NBK simply by KenPom rank in Adjusted Efficiency. Colorado and Creighton sit in the Top 20 in KenPom but only project to 6-seeds per Joey Brackets, putting their odds firmly against making the second weekend. Of the automatic qualifiers, Yale leads the pack in the Ivy. Frankly, our methodology needs to be looked at if we are including a school like SMU – 6th in the American and seemingly going nowhere. We’ll need to tighten things up as Selection Sunday approaches. Liberty has the best current projected seed among the AQs at 11, and Vermont has been an NBK stalwart for years. Go Catamounts. As for Liberty…give me the other.

The Bills look to bust out of a five-way tie for third place (6-3) by beating up on Duquesne, one of the teams in said tie. The Dukes beat SLU handily in the first game of the conference season.

Joey Brackets has the A-10 as a three-bid league this year (Dayton, URI, VCU) so holding serve here is critical.

SLU fans may remember Frankie Hughes, who spent his freshman season at Mizzou before transferring to Duquesne. Hughes is described as Duquesne’s leading three-point shooter “by volume”, which is to say he shoots many and makes not so many. Alas, Frankie is out this season with a knee injury.

I spent fifteen minutes on the internet trying to figure out if Michael and Frankie are related. They do not appear to be, though I could not find anywhere that explicitly stated “no relation”. They love to say “no relation” wherever possible, so I thought. Frankie went to Mizzou for a season but is from Cleveland. Michael went to Akron for a season but is from Kansas City. He chose to follow the coach from Akron to Duquesne.