I know we're excited about the idea of making it to the second weekend consistently, but it's good to be in the field every year in the 2020s.

Only two appearances in the 2010s. It seems almost impossible now. I'm not ready to take this degree of success for granted yet.

Even if things end badly on Friday, we were relevant all year and got a top-6 seed. 5th-best seed since 2007.

Saw that we were the 10th most likely team to get upset in the first round in the Slingshot model. Made me nervous for a bit but then I read more.

Slingshot only covers 1-6 seeds, so 24* matchups.

1-3 seeds hardly ever go down in the first round. None of them are in the top 10, which is quite understandable.

There are 14 4-6 seed matchups they evaluated (two matchups each for each of the play-ins) and the worst one of our matchups (Xavier) has a 26.9% chance of an upset, which ranks 10th most likely of 14.

For comparison, Purdue has a 28.9% chance of losing a 4/13 game in their model.

That’s really not so bad. I’d sign up for a 3/4 chance of making the second round.

*Actually 28 because of play-in pairs.