As much as I'm at the Palestra tonight to watch Temple-St. Joe's, the biggest reason why I wanted to come to the game was to talk to the Bracketologist himself, Joe Lunardi.
In addition to writing the single most important column anywhere on ESPN.com (with apologies to his editor, Andy Glockner, whose Drive to 65 is also worth reading if you follow a multiple-bid conference), Lunardi is the color analyst for Hawks games on the radio.
And he reads this blog, which is even cooler.
So I made sure to get to the Palestra early enough to talk to Lunardi about the local teams and their chances of making it to the Big Dance. Excerpts of my interview with him are after the jump.
I asked him first about Villanova. An 8-seed right now, Lunardi gives them a good chance of moving higher if they can close out the season with some wins.
"I think they will move up – their schedule down the stretch is very favorable," he said. "These two losses [to Georgetown and Marquette] have not been entirely unexpected. They’ve just got to weather and get to the softer games at the back end of their schedule."
Having said that, he's not necessarily assuming the Wildcats will sweep Rutgers, Connecticut and Syracuse to end the season.
"I think they’ll win two out of three, minimally, and that will put them in pretty good stead," he said.
Still, Lunardi said Villanova can't afford more than one loss.
"They’d better move up, because losing would put them in a tenuous position of being under .500 in the Big East," he said. "I’m not sure, given how many teams are in that league, that anybody can sustain that."
As for Penn, Lunardi is well aware that this is the time of year when Quakers fans fret about whether they'll be able to move up any higher than whatever seed they're projected as. Right now, they're a 14. Lunardi says there is room to rise, and that Penn should move up the board if the usual couple of upsets in one-bid conference tournaments take place.
"The bracket now assumes that all of the favorites are going to win those automatic bids -- as we all know, there’s going to be three, or four, or six or seven who don’t," he said. "Penn will rise to a 13 more likely, [with] an outside chance at a 12 based upon how many upsets there are of teams that end up being slotted below them."
Penn has quite an incentive to get out of the 14-seeds, as Lunardi's bracket shows (and as I've almost beaten to death on here before). As in, playing Butler instead of Georgetown.
"There’s a significant drop-off somewhere around the low 3's and the high 4's on the S-Curve, the seeding chart that the committee will use," Lunardi said. "I’ll be anxious to see which teams in the first round of the Big Dance are able to take advantage of that. Certainly, Penn would be a club that would fall into that category of possible upset winners."
The man is not a homer, I promise.
The toughest questions are about Drexel, with their strong non-conference and road records but struggles in CAA play. Lunardi said that the Dragons are giving the Selection committee as much of a headache as much as they are for the rest of us.
"It’s going to be probably one of the longer discussions, deliberations that the committee has," Lunardi said. "I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t have an opinion, if you were a committee member, examining this year’s Drexel club."
Finally, about the wide-open A-10. Sorry to disappoint the Hawks fans out there, but Lunardi says he doesn't see St. Joe's going all the way in Atlantic City.
"I have a hard time picturing this St. Joseph’s team – as much as I’d like to believe differently – playing three or four strong games in successive days," he said.
Lunardi does like Xavier, though -- and why not, as the Musketeers are storming through the Atlantic 10 with recent blowout wins over George Washington and Rhode Island.
"I think if Xavier is the outright Atlantic 10 champion in the regular season, they will get an at-large bid," he said, "provided that their loss in the Atlantic 10 tournament isn’t to the likes of a bottom-feeder."
You can hear my full interview with Joe Lunardi by clicking here. Apologies for the background noise, but it is the Palestra after all.
