Sun Belt Tournament Preview

SUN BELT CONFERENCE (ranked 26th by kenpom)

March 5-8

You Are Looking Live!: At the Summit Arena in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Our first real neutral site arena.

Sponsored by: Geico, Side-Out Foundation, Golden Flake, Clubglove USA, Wilson. Did not make any of these up. Golden Flake apparently makes potato chips?

Tickets: You get a tournament pass to all the Men’s and Women’s games for $128.

The Bracket:

Sun Belt works the same way as the Big12 tournament. They have 12 teams, 2 divisions, but they rank the teams 1-12. Top 4 get a bye.

Saturday March 5: #5 Denver v. #12 Louisiana Monroe (1)

#6 v. #11 Florida International (2)

#7 (3)

#8 (4)

Sunday March 6: #4 Middle Tennessee v. Winner of (1)

#1 Florida Atlantic v. Winner of (4)

#2 Arkansas State v. Winner of (3)

#3 Louisiana Lafayette v. Winner of (2)

Monday March 7: SemiFinals

Tuesday March 8: Finals (ESPN).

The favorite: I’m going to switch it up for the first time, and say Arkansas State is the favorite. They’ve won 3 in a row and 10 of 14. They’re also playing closest to home. The tournament is really up for grabs though.

Trivia: The website for the Sun Belt has an extreme close up of, you guessed it, the sun. It hurts to look at. Do they know that this isn’t what the sun belt refers to? Are the under the assumption that their conference somehow represents a belt of asteroids or some crap rotating around the sun?

Semifinals can be seen on the Sun Belt Network; for those of you who knew that even existed, let alone have it.