If you're like me, you're seeking college basketball news to read and write about aside from the usual offseason slobbering over high school players. Sometimes, we have to invent that news ourselves. Spreading rumors about coaches on the hot seat is considered tacky and indecorous when we don't have the ear of any prominent athletic directors, though.
On a blog that went to the effort of seeding and bracketing a full tournament that trumpets itself as featuring "the real best 68 teams in the nation," it almost seems like something's missing if we don't actually play it through and see how the event would have unfolded. The only way I know of to do that involves our boys at
WhatIf Sports.
WhatIf gives you options to match nearly every team in America against one another and decide how those games would have played out. Depth chart changes can even be made, reflecting such real-world events as Fab Melo's ineligibility for Syracuse.
The format for the Bilas Invitational was that each matchup would be simulated seven times, in effect making each game an NBA-style series. The first four were each under the "Use Home Court" option. Any beyond that used the "Neutral Court" option.
The results that will be posted are of the winning team's fourth win in that seven-game series. You can go simulate these games and you'll get highly different results, but these are what the simulator produced for me.
Go
here to take a look at the full S-Curve, and the bracket is
here. We'll start with the overall top seed, the Kentucky Wildcats, and their journey through the East Region.
