Conference tournament action kicks off tonight as #349 Central Connecticut takes on #346 Farleigh Dickinson in the opening round of the NEC tournament. The great thing about college basketball is either of these two teams could win ten straight and take home the national championship. But would that be a dream or an absolute nightmare? Maybe that’s not the great thing about college basketball after all. Setting our sights slightly lower, we take a look at the Never Been Kissed (NBK) standings as one conference tournament opens while most others finish out the regular season.
Murray St. goes into its conference tournament season with the strongest position among our clubs. The Racers are heavy favorites (65.1% per KenPom’s log5 simulation) to take the Ohio Valley crown, and have some buffer if they do not with a gaudy 28-2 record, #26 KenPom and #24 NET ranking. South Dakota St. is similarly-favored (63.5%) in the Summit, but are just now making their debut on Bubble Watch ($). Doubtful they could muster enough buzz to make a conference tournament final loss anything but fatal to their hopes this year.
In other NBK news, TCU has a very strange COVID-induced home-and-home with kansas this week, then go to West Virginia on Saturday to round out the Big XII regular season. They are expected to lose all three, which would drop the Horned Frogs to 7-11 in the Big XII and certainly push them off Joey Brackets’ list. The Mountain West is a veritable hive of NBK activity, as Boise St., Colorado St., Utah St., and the State of Fresno all look to get off the schneid and make NBK history. Princeton won a big one at Harvard over the weekend, and have their strongest team since the 2016-17 edition that gave Bonzie Colson and Notre Dame everything it could handle in round one before falling 60-58.
Data courtesy Kenpom.com and ESPN Bracketology and NCAA.com