What a great night of championship games on Tuesday, an excellent night for some! All 3 early games were going back and forth, insane baskets and came down to last second plays, without any controversy or a ref show. The same cannot be said about the 2 late games as they were immediate blow outs. The current standings are located here and fully up to date, open at your own risk depending how your night went. I've made a few updates in the last 12 hours to clean up the standings from the super late games. 😱
Let's start with the 6:00 PM CST start time games. The game that finished first was over in the Horizon League with (4) Northern Kentucky edging out (2) Cleveland State by 2 points. 40% of the pool was awarded bonus points and this game completely flipped the standings. This is the 4th time in 7 years that Northern Kentucky has won the Horizon League. 🏀
The second game of the night that wrapped up was (1) Merrimack roaring back with an 8-0 run against (2) Fairleigh Dickinson for the win in the Northeast Conference. Less than 37% of the pool picked Merrimack which meant this was another critical win, or loss, depending the side you were on. Merrimack doesn't get a "clinched" picture since they are ineligible and headed home. 😂
Finally, in the Colonial Conference, (2) Charleston was down big late and ended up storming back and taking the lead to beat (4) UNC-Wilmington. At one point in the game UNC-Wilmington went on an 18-0 run. 57% of the pool was on Charleston so it wasn't as critical as some of the other games tonight, but still very important. 🏀
The late games were over before they started and the results were not unexpected, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on these so here it goes. (1) Oral Roberts roasted (3) North Dakota State to win the Summit League championship and handing out a win to 77% of our pool. And the last championship game of the night was (2) Gonzaga blowing away (1) Saint Mary's to claim the West Coast Conference championship. 71% of our pool won this game, much lower than I thought, we're usually close to 95% on Gonzaga.
We'll now move on to previewing our Wednesday slate of games, it still looks like an overwhelming day of basketball, again starting immediately in the morning. We will have 3 conference tournament championship games, 3 conferences move into the quarterfinals, 2 conferences in round 2 and 6 tournaments tip off. All the big boys are now here to play! Our conference tournament championship games today will take place in the Big Sky, Patriot League, and Southland. The standings are going to dramatically change around again tonight. Let's get started with the preview.
Big Sky
The Big Sky championship game starts at 10:30 PM CST, it's so ridiculous I love it. (2) Montana State will play (9) Northern Arizona, who holds a 5-13 conference record. 13 people in our pool picked Montana State and the computers are on your side. Before the tournament tipped off Montana State was the favorite to win at a 40 % chance and they are favored by 6.5 points tonight. Many people towards the top of the standings have Montana State, this could be a game that finally starts to mathematically eliminate people in the bottom half.
Patriot League
In the most anticlimactic conference championship game of the day (1) Colgate takes on (6) Lafayette. Colgate makes up 80% of our pool picks, was given a 63% chance to win this tournament and is favored by 14.5 points. A Colgate loss helps Whit the most, but overall, this game really doesn't matter for our pool.
Southland
Even more ridiculous than a 10:30 PM CST start time, the Southland conference championship game starts at 4:00 PM CST today. This matchup is huge for our pool and is all chalk as (1) Texas A&M-Corpus Christi plays (2) Northwestern State. 54% of our pool picks are on Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, the pre-tournament analytics favored them, however they are only a 3 point favorite tonight. We should be in for a great early tip conference tournament championship game. For those of you that have been eliminated from this conference you're rooting for Northwestern State to keep the standings tight.
We have another day of great basketball ahead of us and today is the last day of championship games until Saturday. Thursday and Friday are all about loss avoidance and are typically the most stressful days of this pool. I do plan to post 1-2 blog entries throughout the day today and on Thursday morning we will do a deep dive into the standings. 📊
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