Bracket Projection: 1/23

Rivalry week, apparently. Check out those 8-9 matchups this week. Texas A&M-Texas and Florida-Florida State first round matchups would certainly be fun. Other than that, I don't think you'll be too surprised by anything. Let's take a look and then I'll cover the updates from yesterday:

	BOSTON	LOS ANGELES	ATLANTA	OMAHA
1	Villanova	Duke	Virginia	Purdue
2	Clemson	Xavier	Kansas	North Carolina
3	Auburn	Oklahoma	Arizona	West Virginia
4	Texas Tech	Michigan St.	Cincinnati	Tennessee
5	Ohio St.	Kentucky	Seton Hall	Wichita St.
6	TCU	Arizona St.	Rhode Island	Nevada
7	Creighton	Louisville	Miami FL	Gonzaga
8	Michigan	Saint Mary's	Texas A&M	Florida
9	Arkansas	Butler	Texas	Florida St.
10	Syracuse	Missouri	Marquette	Alabama
11	USC	Boise St.	SMU	Notre Dame
11			Providence	UCLA
12	Louisiana Lafayette	Western Kentucky	New Mexico St.	Buffalo
13	South Dakota St.	East Tennessee St.	Vermont	Loyola Chicago
14	Stephen F. Austin	Murray St.	Northeastern	Northern Kentucky
15	UC Santa Barbara	Montana	Bucknell	Canisius
16	Princeton	Texas Southern	Winthrop	Florida Gulf Coast
16	Wagner		North Carolina A&T

Virginia Tech beating North Carolina was about the only notable thing that happened yesterday, and even that you can pretty much ignore because UNC was borderline 1 seed going into the week, so the loss reaffirms them as a 2 right now. 

No more Maryland. Yeah, and that was before they lost to Indiana last night. The Big Ten is down to four teams as predicted earlier this year. However, Ohio State continues to rise like crazy, and that could continue as they legitimately compete to win the Big Ten. It's a crazy year.

Clemson continues to rise. Here's another weird one you may have noticed. The Clemson Tigers have been steadily climbing all year long and are all the way up to a 2 seed with a whopping 10 wins over the RPI top 100. Personally, I would be surprised if the ACC ends up with four of the top 8 teams on the S-curve, but crazier things have happened. They have a huge matchup with Virginia tonight, so by the time you actually are reading this, things could have changed.

Michigan had an eventful week. Since we last met, Michigan won a crazy one against Maryland, got run off the court in Lincoln, and did the normal thing you do when you play Rutgers. That combination of events makes the graph look like this:

We've shifted back to 11-7 but with a favorable skew: still a 70.5% chance of finishing 11-7 or better. Obviously a win Thursday against Purdue would work wonders toward the season outlook. I'll be making the trek down to Mackey to watch the game, so hopefully I'm treated to an exciting game. I'll be writing a post on my trip as I did when I went to Madison, so keep an eye out for that sometime at the end of the week. 

Now I've got an Oklahoma-Kansas game going on in the background that I'd like to pay more attention to so I'm going to close my computer and watch that. You should too.