Arizona has surprising seed in updated NCAA tournament predictions
The Arizona Wildcats are 8-1 in the Big 12 and coming off a thrilling 86-75 overtime win over No. 3 Iowa State that initially bumped them up to No. 11 in the NCAA NET Rankings.
Arizona's only loss in the past six weeks came on the road at Texas Tech, and the Red Raiders are currently ranked No. 12 in the NET.
Despite their impressive run, the Wildcats still have work to do to be considered among the top teams in college basketball.
Arizona's NCAA Tournament Resume
EvanMiya.com, one of the leading college basketball analytics sites, recently introduced a new resume metric that analyzes a team's quality wins.
Instead of using the Quadrant system employed by the NCAA NET Rankings, EvanMiya.com uses two metrics to determine a team's NCAA tournament viability: Win Quality and Loss Quality.
Win Quality "measures how good your wins are based on the difficulty of those games" and Loss Quality "measures how bad your losses are based on the difficulty of those games. Having a loss quality close to zero (loss quality is negative) means that you don’t have many losses, and/or your losses came against good opponents. A lower loss quality often indicates that you have lost some games you should have won."
Arizona's win quality is +3.5 and its loss quality is -2.5, which puts its overall resume at +1.0. That's currently No. 31 in the country and translates to a No. 6-8 seed in the NCAA tournament.
Arizona's best win was over Iowa State (+.58) and its worst loss was to West Virginia (-.59).
CBS Sports NCAA Tournament Predictions
In Jerry Palm's latest NCAA Tournament projections at CBSSports.com, he has the Wildcats exactly where EvanMiya.com predicts they should be — a No. 6 seed.
Palm has Arizona slotted for the South Region, with its first two games in Wichita, Kansas. The Wildcats are projected to play No. 11 Drake in the first round and the winner of No. 4 Oregon vs. No. 13 Northern Colorado in the second round.
The No. 1 seed in the South is Auburn, with Marquette as the No. 2 seed.
Arizona is hoping to be placed in the West Region and play its first-weekend games in Denver, with a chance to advance to the Sweet 16 in San Francisco.
The good news for Arizona is they have at least six more opportunities to pick up "Quality Wins" in the Big 12 and boost their tournament resume. That starts next week with games against BYU on the road (Tuesday) and Texas Tech at home (Saturday).
