NCAA Tournament bracket preview: Iowa State blows UConn off No. 1 seed line -- but why?

For the past two months of the college basketball season, it appeared as though the most obvious element of the NCAA Tournament selection committee’s annual bracket exercise would be completed faster than an Alex Palou lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Michigan. Arizona. Duke. Connecticut.

No need for commas, even.

They had been so clearly the leading candidates for the four No. 1 seeds in the committee’s March Madness Men’s Bracket Preview program on CBS. The only question involved whether UConn or Duke merited placement in the East Region, where both would prefer to contest the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight rounds. Then UConn lost this past week to Creighton. At home. And not the Creighton you used to know, but the one that was .500 entering the game.

Which is why the committee opened its annual Bracket Preview show Saturday on CBS with Iowa State on the top line, joining the three usual 2026 suspects. There’s one problem with this. Iowa State doesn’t have the fourth-best resume in Division I basketball.

It seems this committee has chosen to seed, in part, by vibe -- by recent performance. That was eliminated as an official component of committee deliberations more than 15 years ago.

Iowa State has some impressive victories, including against Houston this past Monday, but half of its four Quad 1A victories – the absolute most difficult games for any team – were at home. It has three wins against teams seeded on the committee’s own top four seed lines, but two were at Hilton Coliseum in Ames.

Connecticut has four Quad 1A wins, and none of those were at either of the Huskies’ two home courts. They got Illinois, Florida and BYU in neutral venues and Kansas at Allen Fieldhouse. Three of those UConn victims also were in the committee’s top 16 teams.

In part because of a lack of opportunity provided by a meager Big East Conference, in part because its performances lately have diminished, UConn has not played the sort of pristine basketball America apparently demands of No. 1 seeds.

Since Jan. 1, the Huskies have earned five victories by two possessions or in overtime against opponents that are .500 or worse in the conference. Their predictive metric scores, which measure a team’s efficiency and dominance, have plunged (relatively). They are only No. 13 at KenPom.com, the most prominent of these rankings.

The committee is not supposed to employ recency in its selections or seedings, however. It is tasked with assessing all that occurs from the start of the season equally, whether it’s early November or early March.

And that deviation from the norm does lead to some questions about what this exercise will mean to how the committee will function when the real NCAA Tournament bracket is composed in advance of the March 15 announcement.

“There were three times kind of in that last conversation for the fourth No. 1 seed,” Gill said.

Houston had been presented by myriad online bracket projections as the logical alternative to UConn as the committee’s fourth projected No. 1 seed. The Cougars’ resume when the committee completed its work midweek, however, included only a 2-3 record against “Quad 1A.” They defeated Arkansas on a neutral floor and BYU on the road, but lost to Iowa State and Texas Tech on the road and to Tennessee at the Players Era tournament in Las Vegas.

But consider that last year’s No. 1 seeds averaged an 8-3 record against Quad 1A opponents. The committee’s other preview No. 1s -- Michigan, Duke and Arizona – are, on average, 5-1 in this category. Iowa State is 4-1. UConn is 4-2.

The Cyclones are defensible as a No. 1 seed, but it requires at least a little finesse. Connecticut – and others aspiring to that position – can recognize these final weeks of the season will be hugely consequential