Sean Miller missed the NCAA Tournament in his first season as Arizona head coach, as did Lute Olson. Tommy Lloyd has the Wildcats in position for a 1-seed in his first season as head coach.
Leading a program for the first time after 20 seasons on Mark Few’s bench, Lloyd is 9-0 (including 3-0 in Quadrant 1 games), ranked No. 1 in the NET Rankings, and sitting alongside Baylor, Kansas, and Gonzaga as 1-seeds in the latest edition of Bracketology.
Arizona climbed two seed lines from the Dec. 1 Bracketology when, as a 3-seed, sat behind UCLA, a 2-seed. The Bruins are still a 2-seed and one of four Pac-12 teams in the field, tied with the West Coast Conference for the sixth-most teams among all conferences.
2022 NCAA Tournament Bracketology projections (as of Dec. 13, 2021):
*Automatic qualifiers
West Region
Midwest Region
South Region
East Region
Three hundred and forty-nine of the 358 teams in college basketball are eligible for March Madness. Among those 349 teams, however, is James Madison, who’s ineligible for the CAA Tournament as the conference punishes the Dukes for their upcoming departure for the Sun Belt. And in a historically poor conference incapable of building résumés worthy of at-large consideration, James Madison, for all intents and purposes, is ineligible for the 2022 NCAA Tournament.
Oklahoma State is also ineligible thanks to NCAA penalties stemming from the FBI investigation. And eight more teams cannot compete as they reclassify from lower divisions: Bellarmine, Cal Baptist, Dixie State (soon to be Utah Tech), Merrimack, North Alabama, St. Thomas, Tarleton State, and UC San Diego.
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