Auburn's NCAA Tournament projections on Selection Sunday
Are the Tigers still No. 1 overall? Will they go to Lexington? How about Atlanta? And who might they play in the first weekend?
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When Auburn clinched the outright SEC regular-season championship two weeks ago at Kentucky, there was a prevailing thought that — no matter what happened between then and Selection Sunday — the Tigers were going to be heading back to Rupp Arena as the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The last four games have tested that belief, especially among Auburn fans. Auburn lost at Texas A&M without Denver Jones, lost to Alabama on a Mark Sears buzzer-beater, beat Ole Miss in a grind-it-out SEC Tournament quarterfinal and lost a close one to Tennessee in the semifinals.
When the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee starts to reveal its bracket at 5 p.m. CT on Sunday, Auburn will still have the top resume in all of college basketball.
Yes, even with the losses down the stretch.
Auburn has 16 Quad 1 wins and 22 Quad 1 + Quad 2 wins, which are both two more than the next-closest team, Houston. Auburn’s Wins Above Bubble leads the country at +12.5. Auburn is No. 2 in NET behind Duke, but the Blue Devils are several spots behind the Tigers in the resume metrics.
“They talk about the body of work as much as anything, the wins we had all season long, the strength of the league,” Bruce Pearl said Saturday. “We lost to a team that's fighting for a 1 seed.
Obviously I'm very proud of the SEC. Just incredibly proud to be a part of this tournament, to be a part of this league. ... Yeah, it means a lot to us. In other words, to me, this is one of the things I've talked to the team about: If you're the No. 1 overall seed, then basically you had the best regular season from November all the way to March. We'd love to be able to hold onto that. We'll find out Sunday.”
As we’ve done throughout the season, let’s take a look at where Auburn sits on Bracket Matrix — which compiles the NCAA Tournament projections from more than 100 bracketologists across the Internet.
This morning, I went through all the projections on the Matrix to see which ones had been updated through Saturday night’s results.
So far, I’ve found 42 of them. I’ll try to refresh this a time or two throughout the day.
Here’s where the projections have Auburn in terms of overall seed, regional location, first-weekend location, potential 16 seed matchups and potential 8/9 matchups in the second round.
(If the numbers and percentages don’t always line up, just keep in mind that some projections are just seed lists, some projections are just matchups and some projections try to fill out all the possible data.)