Beating the Bracket: A Guide to the Midwest Region

What teams are underseeded? Overseeded? Gleaning the answers can be the difference between being an office also-ran and the winner of your annual NCAA tournament pool. The Midwest Region offers many potential surprises, particularly as the tournament pairs down weaker squads.

The following are the Value Add Rankings for each player in the top half of the Midwest Region, their team’s seed, height, year in school and which players are NBA prospects (all caps) as well as which of the other players are guards (small “g”). The teams are Cal Poly (16-seed), Kansas St. (9), Kentucky (8), Louisville (4), Manhattan (13), NC State (12), St. Louis (5), Texas Southern (16), Wichita St. (1) and Xavier (12). Most likely upsets:

Both Louisville and Russ Smith are repeating their run last year. Again, Smith was not in the Top 100 players in Value Add earlier in the year, and has skyrocketed to the 11th ranking and Louisville are likely to have just enough to get past Wichita State again this year. Earlier, St. Louis could lose to the winner of the play-in. NC State has improved from 79th to 66th while St. Louis has fallen from 19th to 34th in the last month. St. Louis does have a clear edge at guard against NC State, but not against Xavier’s NBA-bound Semaj Christon. It looks tough either way for St. Louis.

Home Advantage: St. Louis is a pretty fair site for Wichita State’s game against the Kentucky-Kansas State winner. Whoever merges might rather face Duke than Michigan in Indianapolis (site of the Big Ten football championship) in their third game.

The items listed for the top few players on each team should be the biggest considerations along with injured players, the home advantage, and which team enters the tournament hot (which we define as improving the most at www.kenpom.com over the past month of the season). The system is a precise measurement of how many points a player adds to his team’s score per game over the player who takes his place. Every score (three-pointer, two-pointer or foul shot), assist, offensive rebound, foul drawn, etc. helps a team score while every turnover and missed shot costs the team points. On defense, every steal, blocked shot, defensive rebound, turnover forced, and opponent’s missed shot takes points off the board while every basket or offensive rebound allowed adds to the opponent’s score. The player’s offensive and defensive combination calculates together with the help of the stats at www.kenpom.com. How many points a player adds to his team’s score appears in the offensive category (shown as “off” in the table below), and his overall impact on points once defense is factored appears as “Total” on the table.