Joe Lunardi projects Michigan as a #1 seed in 2022
His four #1 seeds are Michigan, Gonzaga, UCLA and Kansas. The other B10 teams he has in the tourney are OSU (2 seed), Purdue (2), Maryland (3), MSU (5), Illinois (6), Indiana (7) and Iowa (11). The obvious missing team is Wisconsin, which idk if I agree, but hey who really cares if Wisconsin is in or out? And yes, this is stupid because it's May and Lunardi is pretty much a moran, but it's nice to see that Juwan is starting to get the benefit of the doubt as a possible maybe not too bad basketball coach.
Fuck Wisconsin.
Living on the boarder of WI and working most of the time 40 minutes south of Madison, this 1000 times...
Man those uniforms look like blatant ripoffs of the Red Wings. I mean just look at the font for the player's names.
Sparty can kiss my ass.
Considering the recent success against them I don’t hate them anymore as much. My hatred in basketball is MSU>>>>OSU>>>>IU>>>>Dook
Being left off the list must have been a helluva nut punch.
Those 26 year olds might as well start lookin for a job now instead wasting another year in basketball futility.
Didn’t Wisconsin lose everyone? From a team that wasn’t that good anyway. I’m sure they’ll be decent but omitting them isn’t a huge surprise to me.
Apparently Brad Davidison is back although I havent seen a thread on it yet.
?
he must want to punch more dongs
Brad Davison is back.
The guy is the definition of a bad penny. He always turns up somewhere.
What a maroon
I think you meant to say macaroon.
i've always preferred macarons.
everyone loves the macarena
Damn straight.
Highly doubtful on Iowa
They have Bohannon, maybe Wieskamp, and Murray. That's it. I would be shocked if they aren't in the bottom half of the league next year
Their defense will pull them through
The B1G will likely have 8 teams in again-that 8th one might be Iowa.
I don't see B1G having 8 teams in next season. It's going to be a down year and I think we'll see 6-7 NCAA tourney teams next season.
An 11 seed just means they need to win like 7 or 8 big ten games. I think it's a reasonable projection, especially given the expected drop in overall b1g strength next year
A 7-13 or 8-12 record wouldn't be good enough to make the tournament. The Big Ten was supposed to be historically strong this year, and still Sparty's 9-11 record only got them to the First Four.
It's got to be really frustrating to be an Iowa basketball fan. McCaffery can usually reel in some pretty good talent, or at very least guys who can shoot. His teams can contend for the conference, and still has never had real luck in the tournament. He had his best team ever this past season, a Wooden award winner, and still couldn't make it past the Round of 32.
A lot of pretty good regular season teams, some very good regular seasons, and absolutely nothing to show for it in the postseason.
With the return of this coaching staff, a #1 seed is a reasonable prediction. I believe Michigan was the best-coached team in college basketball last year-didn't quite have the horses in the end...especially with Livers' injury. Next year is going to be a very interesting one for this team. There is a very high ceiling but it will take quite the orchestrating to pull everything together.
Edited for being redundantly redundant.
Looks like OSU wants to be the first school to lose to a 15 seed two years in a row. That should be fun.
Not sure why Joe Lunardi is a "moran" when he's pretty damn accurate when it comes to predicting which teams make the tourney every year. Of course I'm talking about when the season actually gets going and he has some data to work with. Right now I wouldn't take any prediction for next years field seriously.
Lunardi did have Oral Roberts in his bracket beating OSU last year. They don’t call him Joey Brackets for nothing.
You mean his final projection - made the morning of Selection Sunday - is accurate. Of course by that point 95% of the tourney field is obvious and there are usually just a couple of teams he has to make an educated guess on.
His earlier projections are often far off the mark.
That's most brackets, whether human or machine. Pretty much every bracket gets more accurate as you get closer to Selection Sunday.
Of course. But people seem to misunderstand and think that Lunardi is calling his shot well in advance.
nothing wrong with lunardi, he's solid.
Is Staee really going to be a top 25 program next year?
Unfortunately I think they will. Tiny Tim Izzo is like that movie villain who just won’t die. He will somehow have them back in the top 25 next season.
To be honest I think it will be very close, they do have that stud transfer pg coming in but still have no true center besides bingham who is still kind of raw. They will also need the freshman (forgot his name) to come in and be a stud at the 2. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t a top 25 team and end up somewhere like an 8 or 9 seed
There may be a difference between what they actually are and what they are ranked. They'll get the benefit of the doubt based on some good teams St. Izo had decades ago, then get over seeded, then get upset early while he stomps on the sideline (followed by a presser he starts off by saying, "I'm not going to make any excuses" and then spends the rest of the session making excuses).
I think it comes down to 2 guys: Tyson Walker and Max Christie. They need both of those guys to be 12+ PPG guys or else I just don't see where the scoring is going to come from
If I ever meet Lunardi I will buy him a beer for that Oral Roberts pick.
I'd be interested to see how accurate Lunardi's 'early' projections have been in recent years. I can't imagine it's good
Fuck all the morans!
Colonel Moran takes exception. (Look it up.)
Colonel Sebastian Moran is a fictional character in the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. An enemy of Sherlock Holmes, he first appears in the 1903 short story "The Adventure of the Empty House". Holmes once described him as "the second most dangerous man in London," the most dangerous being Professor Moriarty, Moran's employer.
i’ll take Sharty to lose to the 12 seed.
If you watched the tournament, Michigan was the only contender from the B10, the rest were pretenders.... LOL
I know some say we beat the hell out of each other and peaked early, but that was a nosedive I hadn’t seen in a while. We carried the water for the B1G...damn shame no one from the B1G has won it all since Staee!
It makes sense, considering the absurd amount of talent that is coming in and the talent that is staying. Juwan has shown he can coach in addition to being able to recruit.
Jeff Goodman has Michigan 13th and 4th in Big 10.
Goodman always underrates Michigan until he's forced to rank them higher or else he looks like an idiot