Selection Sunday: Kansas, Kentucky, Duke And Syracuse Tabbed As No. 1 Seeds

Chris Dobbertean, SB Nation’s resident bracketologist and editor of Blogging The Bracket, shares his initial thoughts about the NCAA field and his very early picks.

What started in November with early round games for the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic is rapidly reaching its conclusion. Tonight’s announcement of the NCAA field of 65 means that the season will soon be over. But looking at the bracket, as flawed as it is, with Duke as a 1, West Virginia a 2, Temple a 5, Gonzaga as an 8, Cornell as a 12, it looks like we’ll be in for a maddening three weekends of basketball.

The general consensus is that the NCAA selection committee basically got the 65 teams right; though we at SBN figured Virginia Tech would be in, it’s not exactly a disservice that the Hokies were left out. The eight at-large bids given to mid-major teams seemed fair and reasonable, and now we can focus on the tourney, hooray hooray.

Still, there’s a few teams who can make the case that the committee buried them with inaccurately low seeds. Not surprisingly, they’re all mid-majors:

Bracketology is over, bubbles have been popped and Joe Lunardi is slowly climbing back into his cave until he reappears next year (Mel Kiper lives there when Lunardi’s not using it) -- all that can only mean one thing: the 2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Bracket is complete.

View the entire bracket here: 2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Bracket

Duke already received a surprising No. 1 seed Sunday night, and now they catch another break with arguably the easiest draw in the tournament -- they miss West Virginia and instead get a slumping Villanova as the No. 2 seed in their bracket.

Expect plenty more reaction to the complete filed here in this StoryStream throughout the night from our team of bloggers, including our resident Bracketology expert, Chris Dobbertean of Blogging the Bracket (who correctly predicted all but one of the at-large teams).

A few years ago, a book titled The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything was published. The focus of the book was to explore the application of NCAA Tournament-style bracket logic to everyday decisions we make. From a write-up on the book:

After thinking about it, I think there’s some truth to this. Whether conscious or not, the decisions we make lead to future decisions, which compound into end results. For example, given the time change and your decisions last night, what time did you wake up on Sunday, and what did you have for breakfast? Let’s draw up a bracket.

At 6:00 P.M. Eastern, CBS will broadcast its NCAA Tournament selection show. We’ll be offering results and commentary before, during, and after the proceedings.

There are plenty of pressing questions to be answered, but the most recent is this: on the heels of Mississippi State’s overtime loss to the hugely favorited Kentucky, where do they stand?