Our latest bracket projection by Chris Dobbertean has High Point representing the Big South in the NCAA Tournament. Joe Lunardi has Radford representing the Big South in the NCAA Tournament. Yahoo’s Brad Evans has Coastal Carolina representing the Big South in the NCAA Tournament. All of these are just guesses, because there are SEVEN TEAMS TIED FOR FIRST PLACE:
The Big South has 7 teams in first place at the same damn time
This league has 11 teams, seven of which are technically in first place.
Yes, over half the teams in the 11-team conference are technically in first. The Big South went to Oprah, and looked under their seat, and sure enough, all of them got A BRAND NEW SPOT IN FIRST PLACE!
Sadly, this anomaly will be short-lived: the seven-way tie for first place will turn into a 5-way tie for second place Monday night, when 8-4 Gardner-Webb hosts 8-4 UNC-Asheville. One team will take sole ownership of first place and one will drop all the way to seventh place.
It’s easy to see how this happens: There are a lot of teams of relatively similar quality -- the top seven rank between 138 and 211 in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings -- and a few horrific teams boosting everybody else’s win totals. Longwood, Presbyterian, and Liberty sit below 314th in those rankings. Those four teams on the bottom are a combined 2-30 against the seven teams on top. So the okay teams are splitting their games against each other and racking up free wins from the cellar dwellers.
The Big South is just a one-bid league, so who actually finishes in first in the regular season standings doesn’t matter a whole bunch. Whoever wins the conference tournament will go to the NCAA Tournament. A seven-way tie for first would make seeding a complete nightmare, but it probably won’t end up that way at the end of the season, and it wouldn’t matter a ton: when you’ve got this much parity, who cares who’s No. 1 and who’s No. 5? The top five seeds will get byes, so these teams will want to avoid ending up in sixth or seventh to avoid having to play an extra game.
(And for what it’s worth, if the team with the best regular season record gets an NIT autobid if they don’t win the conference tourney, so that’s nice.)
We won’t pick who gets the top seed in the tourney, if we had to bet who wins the conference’s autobid, we’d pick Coastal Carolina -- not necessarily because they’re the best team, but because they’re lucky enough to host the Big South tournament. Home court advantage can go a long way in college hoops, and they’ll get to play with it all tourney -- they won last year’s, losing to Virginia in the NCAA Tournament.
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