March Madness 2022: What to know about every team in the men’s NCAA tournament bracket

The play-in games are today already. Here is the full line-up.

Here are the pre-tournament rankings from the polls, with the #1 seeds in the top four slots.

Sagarin’s computer rankings are very comparable. He would send the same four teams to the tournament as #1 seeds, but diverges from the polls and the tournament seeders on the #2s. The most dramatic gap is in the case of Houston. The polls rank Houston 15th, and the high sheriffs of seeding didn’t even place them that high, but Sagarin’s method says they are the 5th-best team in the nation, just barely behind the #1 seeds. On the other side of the ledger, his calculations indicate that Auburn is not strong enough to merit a #2 seed, so he would have given that slot to Houston, which actually received a lowly #5 seed, placing them outside the top 16! The computer differs on two other #2 seeds, but that’s just a matter of flipping #2s and #3s.

Both Sagarin and the polls rate Gonzaga far above any challengers, despite their soft schedule. They are ranked 104th in strength of schedule, while Kansas (for example) grinds it out against the 4th-hardest slate of opponents.

I know that Sagarin uses some complex math in his calculations, while I had to rely on my eyeballs, but I can’t agree with his assessment of Houston. They played only two of the top 25 teams, and lost both games. At a quick glance, their schedule looks much weaker than Gonzaga’s, although his calculations indicate otherwise.

Per Sagarin, Michigan played the toughest schedule, which is how they earned a respectable #11 seed with a record barely above .500. They played 11 games against the top 25 teams, with a 3-8 result.

Purdue won the most games against top 25 teams. They were 8-4. The Wisconsin Badgers had only one less victory and a better winning percentage at 7-2.

Poor West Virginia and Missouri lost the most games against top 25 opponents. They were each 1-10 against that group. Northwestern actually did a little worse, at 0-9 against the big boys, but hey, they’re Northfuckingwestern, where the basketball team probably has to take tests in Advanced Russian Grammar and Quantum Mechanics on game day.