Tony Natoci is back this year to provide bracket updates as we lead up to the NCAA Tournament. This is Tony’s eighth year as a Bracket Matrix contributor and his sixth year writing Bracket Watch columns for UM Hoops. He publishes his own bracket at Heartbreak City and will outline where Michigan stands in current bracketology models, both in his own bracket and notable national brackets, along with updates and insights about the process, key bubble games to watch, and more.
Michigan has only played one game since the last Bracket Watch, but it was an impactful one – a three-point Quad-1 road win (its third straight Quad-1 road win by exactly three points!) in Columbus against an Ohio State Buckeye team that was a slight favorite.
Between then and now we also tuned in to watch the Selection Comittee reveal its top 16 teams in the Bracket Preview Show. The seventh annual “bracketology midterm” went roughly as expected. As most bracketologists (myself included) predicted, Michigan checked in as a four seed last Saturday – just behind Big Ten teams Purdue and Wisconsin and a little ahead of Michigan State.
At this point, the league title race has essentially come down to Michigan, Michigan State, and Wisconsin (with the Boilermakers and Terrapins hanging on by a thread).
Michigan’s performance against the Spartans tomorrow in Ann Arbor and three weeks later in East Lansing will go a long way toward determining (a) whether or not it hangs a regular season conference championship banner and (b) how high it ends up in the field of 68.
The focus of the college basketball world will be fixed squarely on the in-state rivalry tomorrow night, and with a Wolverine team that hasn’t looked this good in four years and an arena that hasn’t opened up its turnstiles for a game of this magnitude in six, why would it be anywhere else?
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