Bracketology: Where is Penn State basketball projected for the NCAA tournament?
Penn State men’s basketball team has gone from an NCAA Tournament hopeful to a lock to make the Big Dance.
With just over two weeks 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-30 team in the country and the three predictive rankings, BPI, KenPom and Sagarin have Penn State in the top 25. Those three rankings are part of every team’s resume that the NCAA Selection Committee considers when seeding the NCAA Tournament. That’s a slight drop from two weeks ago when they were a consensus top-15 team in the country.
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. The Nittany Lions have a difficult two-game stretch ahead with a chance to rise in all four rankings if they can earn two wins. They’ll take on the Iowa Hawkeyes and Michigan State Spartans in their next two games. Both opponents are in the top 30 of all four rankings with the Spartans coming in as a top-10 team in the three predictive rankings.
Bracket Projections
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi and Fox College Hoops’ Mike DeCourcy both have the Nittany Lions as a 4 seed, based on where their resume currently stands. 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. 4 seed, which aligns with the other two prognostications, helps validate the other projections.
