Sweet 16: SEC needs bench to beat MAC (Big East, MVC eliminated)

In New York, the Mid American’s top five players went toe-to-toe with the SEC for a 41-41 tie due to double digit outings for Karrington Ward (Eastern Michigan) and Richaun Holmes (Bowling Green). However, the SEC’s second team of Chris Denson (Auburn), Jordan Clarkson (Missouri), Michael Frazier (Florida), Algie Key (Alabama) and Aaron Harrison (Kentucky) dominated each of their counterparts for a 78-68 win.The Elite 8 match-up was set up with the 14-seed MAC pulled the upset of the tournament over the 3-seed Big East 72-70 behind Ohio center Maurice Ndour, who beat his counterpart 9-5. 

While the 3-seed indicates that the Big East is the third best conference from top to bottom, the loss of stars from Syracuse, Pitt and Louisville leaves their All-Conference team much weaker than last year.Meanwhile the SEC was unable to contain the Wichita State duo of Ron Barker and Fred Van Vleet. However, that was offset by the Kentucky duo of Willie Cauley-Stein and Aaron Harrison holding their counterparts to a combined three points to give the SEC an easy 78-60 win over the MVC.

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 is the Elite 8 box score, followed by the box scores for the two Sweet 16 games that set up the Elite 8 showdown: 

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