Horizon League Tournament Preview

HORIZON LEAGUE TOURNAMENT (ranked 11th by kenpom).

March 1-8

Hosted By: Higher Seeds in first Round, #1 Seed for next two (UW-Milwaukee), higher seed for championship (I’ll explain more later).

Sponsored by: Horizon League: Raise Your Sights. Wikipedia says its sponsored by Speedway, but the website says nothing. If they are sponsored, they’re not doing a very good job promoting speedway. Maybe theyre not though. I’m starting to think that maybe these tournaments that switch venues don’t have sponsors. Could I be right?

Tickets: Case-by-case throughout. I can’t even focus on this, cause shit is about to get messed up.

The Bracket:

Double Bye. You think that’s bad? Consider this. Two teams get a double bye. No one else gets any byes. This is not seen in any other tournament ever. So every team will play two games before Butler or Milwaukee play one. Very strange. Then factor in that the four quarterfinals will be at different sites, then all the teams will travel to Milwaukee, and then the championship could be somewhere else. Ugh.

Tuesday March 1: #3 Cleveland State v #10 UIC (1)

#6 Wright State v. #7 Green Bay (2)

#4 Valpariaso v. #9 Youngstown State (3)

#5 Detroit v. #8 Loyola (4).

Friday March 4: (1) vs (2) This will be (5)

(3) vs (4) This will be (6)

Saturday March 5: #2 Butler v Winner of (5)

#1 Milwaukee v Winner of (6)

Tuesday March 8: Finals

The favorite: The reason I was so hesitant to even suggest that Milwaukee will be hosting the finals, is because they are very surprisingly the #1 seed. Kenpom has them ranked as the sixth best team in the conference, and only one spot (nationally) ahead of Detroit. They tied with Butler and Cleveland State for first place, and had the worst overall record by far (18-12, against Butlers 21-9 and Cle States 24-7). So they won this how? They were 2-2 against Butler and Cle State. Cle State was 1-3. Butler was 1-2. There you have it. Yet, Milwaukee did go 13-5. They did win nine of their final ten. They did win at Cleveland State. So I will give them some credit. However, they played Valpo at home two weeks ago and won by three. This could be their first opponent, and they may fall.

The favorites figure to be Cle State and Butler, who will then possibly face off in the semi-finals. As Norris Cole has played better for Cle State, they have played worse. They’ve lost 4 of their last 7. Butler has won 7 in a row. I’m leaning slightly to picking Butler to repeat as champions. This is a tough call though. As much as I talked poorly about Milwaukee, consider this. They need to win one game, at home, to reach the finals. Then, if there, they would most likely play Butler or Cle State. They beat Butler at hom by 24 in January. They won at Cle State last week (but lost to them at home by 23 in December, go figure). All in all, Ill go with Butler.

Trivia: The website for this tournament sucks. But, the biggest image of the front page is “Take the Horizon League Bracket Challenge! Enter Now” Nice. Good to see that the Horizon league is promoting pools and gambling on things I wouldn’t even consider. Oscars, yeah, you can do that. WGC? Yeah. Horizon conference tournament? I wouldn’t have thought of that. Especially when the format is so dumb. But, after looking at the matchups, and as I described above, you could probably have a pool with a lot of different variations. That being said, every person would automatically get 2 out of 4 final four teams right, so that’s kinda dumb.

The Horizon league got two bids two years ago: both Butler and Cle State got in. I think this is a one bid league this year. Especially since only one of Cle State and Butler will even make the finals of the tournament.