I haven't gotten into BracketBuster fever this year, which is surprising to me because I love lists and numbers. The projections for the annual event are heavy on both. The actual announcement will be coming in the next few days. What is known for sure is that UC Davis will be a road team and, unless one of the camera crews gets hopelessly lost, the game won't be one of the 12 picked up by ESPN.
The good people over at caazone.com have posted their projections here, based solely on RPI and scheduling conflicts. This is not a perfect list, given that it has some teams from the same conference playing against each other, which is not allowed. Following the games cherrypicked by the WWL, the rest of the pairings are done by RPI and ease of travel. That last factor, of course, can mean a lot of things, as you can see by last year's BracketBuster pairings from the Big West:
San Francisco-Irvine; Pacific-Montana; Cal Poly-Portland State; Wright State (Ohio)-Fullerton; Cleveland State-Northridge; Eastern Washington-UCSB; Riverside-Idaho; Hawaii-Long Beach.
With an airport 15 minutes away, UCD has a high ease of travel factor generally. There are also direct flights to Chicago, New York and Washington, which makes an East Coast trip a major possibility. According to this list, the current pairing RPI-wise is Eastern Michigan. Manhattan (which, as NYC geography fans all know, is actually in the Bronx) and Northern Illinois are pretty close in RPI and not all that difficult to get to air-travel wise. So that will be interesting.
It will also be interesting to see if the Big West can get two teams on television. UCSB and Northridge are hovering around that cutoff. That sort of exposure would be pretty good for everyone involved.
Whoever the Aggies are drawn against will be obligated to make a return trip to The Pavilion next season.
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