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.

So it’s been 25 years since a B10 team has won the national title. A few have made nice runs (Wiscy, Purdue, Illinois) but no cigar at the end. So is it the style of play in the conference, the coaching, recruiting, bad luck, a combination of two or more? In the 80’s and 90’s I thought the B10 was the best basketball conference in the country - not close anymore.