Round 1: Big East 70, Southland 68 and MAC 74, BW 66

In Buffalo, opposing power forwards Doug McDermott (Creighton) and Jacob Parker (Stephen F. Austin) both led their teams in scoring as the 3-seed Big East barely survived a challenge from the 30-seed Southland 70-68. Despite the low rating for the conference, Stephen F. Austin ranks as the 86th best team in the country at www.kenpom.com behind the trio of Parker, Jabari Peters and Thomas Walkup. The Big East will travel to New York to play the 14-seed MAC, which beat the Big West 74-66 behind Eastern Michigan center Glenn Bryant allowing his counterpart Christian Standhardinger of Hawaii only four points.

In the mock tournament, all 32 conferences were seeded based on their ratings at www.kenpom.com, and then sent to their likely 2014 tournament sites. The top 10 players to date from each conference were pitted against their counterpart using the Value Add Predictor  to determine how many points each player would score against his counterpart, with the winning team advancing. All players can be looked up at www.valueaddbasketball.com. The following are the box scores for both games: 

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