March Madness According to ESPN: Who's on the Bubble?

ESPN's Joe Lunardi was talking bracketology again yesterday as we inch closer and closer to the NCAA Tournament a.k.a. March Madness. Some of the big storylines that he touched upon included what exactly does Syracuse's win over Georgetown mean? Does it completely cancel out the Orangemen's lose to the Bulls of South Florida? Or does that loss still stick in the back of the mind of the selection committee. Kentucky basketball fans expect a Final Four appearance every year. With the Wildcats getting stomped at the hands of the Vanderbilt Commadores it appears that Kentucky won't even make the field of 65 given their losses to a team like Gardner Webb in the very infantile stages of this season. Lunardi says that the Wildcats would still have a shot if they played well in the last few games of SEC regular season play and in the Southeastern Conference Tournament.

The question that always comes up in March is how many teams will each conference get into the tournament? With these big conferences spending a ton of money on their men's basketball programs each year of course they are going to push for and get more teams in the tourney. This is the way it should be though really, they are the better teams. With more parity in college basketball nowadays we've started to see some of the lesser noticed conferences get more attention. The conference tournament that I personally enjoy the most is the Missouri Valley Tournament because you get to know most of those kids over four years because the over whelming majority of them certainly aren't going to the NBA. I also find the Valley match ups to the most entertaining because the teams are so evenly matched as well. Maybe part of the reason is because I grew up in the Midwest and this is why I enjoy Missouri Valley basketball.