It's time for another field of 64 projection!
The SEC leads all conferences with 10 teams projected to make the NCAA Tournament, followed by the ACC with eight and the Big 12 with six teams. The Pac-12 ends with five teams while the Sun Belt has four, rounding out the top 5 conferences.
UC Irvine, Kansas State, Arizona State, and Arizona are the first four teams out, while USC, NC State, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are the last four teams in. We went back and forth for a while on the bubble teams. A team like Kansas State who has a head-to-head sweep over Oklahoma and finished higher in the conference standings than Oklahoma was left out of the field in our projection just because of Kansas State's RPI (55) compared to Oklahoma's (40). We also felt UC Irvine just didn't have the quality wins that some of these other teams did. Arizona State dropping out of the top 50 in RPI took away UC Irvine's only top 50 RPI wins, putting them at 0-1 vs the Top 50.
Arizona made a really nice run in the conference tournament, but we think they needed to win the auto bid to ensure their standing in the field. They finished Pac-12 regular season play with a 12-18 record, which feels too hard to overcome.
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