Bracketology: Where could Penn State men’s basketball end up in the NCAA Tournament?
Penn State men’s basketball team has gone from an NCAA Tournament hopeful to a virtual lock to make the Big Dance.
With one month until Selection Sunday, let’s take a look at where the Nittany Lions stack up in rankings and bracket projections from around the college basketball world.
Rankings
The Nittany Lions are clearly a top-20 team in the country and the three predictive rankings, BPI, KenPom and Sagain have Penn State in the top 15. Those three rankings are part of every team’s resume that the NCAA Selection Committee considers when seeding the NCAA Tournament.
Penn State is slightly lower in the NCAA’s NET rankings. While the other three rankings are predictive rankings, NET is a combination of a results-based and predictive ranking.
Bracket Projections
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi and FOX College Hoops’ Mike DeCourcy both have the Nittany Lions as a 4-seed with one major caveat for both. Their latest bracket projections came before Penn State’s big road win over Purdue Tuesday night. Even with the win not included, Penn State’s status as a top-four seed would be the highest seed in program history. The current highest is the 1996 team’s No. 5 seed.
T-Ranketology is a unique bracket projection because of its goal. While most bracket projections attempt to determine what the NCAA Tournament would look like if the season ended at the time it’s released, T-Ranketology does not. Its purpose is to predict the outcome of the rest of the season and seed the tournament based on those results. Penn State’s status as a No. 2 seed in the projection could be more indicative of where the Nittany Lions will finish in the bracket than other projections.
This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 12:04 PM.
