Posted by ScooterDevil on December 18, 19 at 14:14:13:
So 68 teams make the NCAA tournament. In looking at the conferences there are 20 conferences that are likely 1 bid conferences whose conference champ and automatic bid will fall out of the top 68 teams. So taking 68-20 I got 48 teams that will make the tournament either from winning their conference or at-large.
Although the committee does not follow the NET rankings exactly that is clearly the best ranking list to go by. So we can assume around 48-50 is the cutoff.
ASU currently ranks #29 in the NET rankings. So we are well within the range for a bid. In addition we play St. Mary's tonight (#63) and Creighton in Saturday (#56). Not great but that won't bring our NET ranking down. And even better yet the PAC-12 has 8 teams in the top 60 of the NET rankings. For comparison here are the other Power conferences:
ACC - 5
Big East - 7
Big 10 - 11
Big 12 - 7
SEC - 5
So unlike last year when PAC-12 teams could not really improve during the year because none of us had good enough NET rankings going .500 in conference this year and winning 18-20 games puts you in good position to get in.