4 NCAA tournament opponents your team should hope to avoid on Selection Sunday

Each year, the NCAA tournament committee spends months painstakingly evaluating college basketball to ensure that every team is in its right place come Selection Sunday.

Then, just hours into each tournament, the committee is proven laughably wrong as lower seeds score signature upsets to ignite improbable tournament runs. Such is the nature — and the fun — of the NCAA tournament and its single-elimination format.

The committee — despite its best efforts — is going to get plenty wrong this year with teams that make you wonder: How were they seeded so low?

Here are some strong candidates to outplay their projected seeds, aka the matchups you hope your favorite team avoids come selection Sunday. Let’s start with a familiar face entering tournament play with lowered expectations.

Gonzaga Bulldogs

25-7, 14-2 WCC | Projected seed: 7 | KenPom: 15

Following an 11-5 start with no Quad 1 wins, there was talk of perennial power Gonzaga actually missing the NCAA tournament. Those concerns were quashed by a 14-2 finish that included wins over Kentucky and Saint Mary’s.

The Bulldogs are now safely into the NCAA tournament for a 25th-straight season. But they’re entering tournament play with a considerably lower profile than than the title contenders Mark Few has produced for the better part of the last decade.

Is that fair? Wells, yes. There’s no Jalen Suggs here. There’s no Rui Hachimura. There’s no Chet Holmgren. There’s no Brandon Clarke. There’s not a bonafide NBA player in sight.

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What there is is a strong top-to-bottom team with a coach and a profile that bodes well for March success. The Bulldogs produced three First-team All-WCC selections in Graham Ike, Ryan Nemhard and Anton Watson, each of whom has at least three years of NCAA experience.

They’re entering tournament play on a heater. Since Jan. 11, their only two losses came against a Saint Mary’s team that could have also easily made this list. In between, they beat then-No. 17 Kentucky and that same Saint Mary’s team when it was ranked 17th in the nation.

And the metrics like Gonzaga more than the prognosticators. The Bulldogs are ranked 16th in KenPom and 17th in NET Rankings, a measure that’s both results-based and predictive. By both measures, the Zags are better than their widely projected No. 7 seed suggests. A trip to the second weekend here would not be a surprise.

St. John’s Red Storm

20-12, 11-9 Big East | Projected seed: 10-11 | KenPom 24

On Feb. 19, Rick Pitino called his first year coaching St. John’s “the most unenjoyable experience of my life.” That statement followed a 68-62 loss to Seton Hall, St. John’s third straight. The Red Storm had blown a 19-point lead to their longtime rivals, prompting Pitino to take his frustrations out on his team’s effort and the program’s “sh***y facilities.”

Since…