Lost NCAA tourney doesn’t mean day off for Lunardi

As usual, ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi, aka Joey Brackets, was busy working on his final bracket on Sunday, even though the NCAA tournament was canceled three days earlier.

The work this time, though, was not as stressful as it usually is on this day, which should have been Selection Sunday. Lunardi, the Drexel Hill resident and former Daily Times sports correspondent, would update his bracket on an if-needed basis as each conference tournament came to a close, and would release it before the NCAA revealed the official 68-team field on national television.

“I’m going to formalize this bracket,” Lunardi said, referring to the last bracket he released, which was Thursday after word came down that the tournament had been canceled for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic. “There won’t be any changes to it. I’m going to update tip times and point spreads and I’m going to assign ESPN announcers and then I’m going to tweak the tournament as it goes, like 7 o’clock on Tuesday night when Prairie View plays whomever, we’ll see if that has any traction. So I have actually fictionalized the tournament all the way through Friday at this point. That would be down to 32 teams.”

Notice that Lunardi used the present tense of plays, not the past tense, played, in reference to the first game of the First Four in Dayton, which he was planning to attend. Force of habit, I guess. Like the rest of us, Lunardi is still trying to wrap his head around a March with no madness.

“It’s sad,” he said. We’ll never know who was in and who was out, let alone which team would win the national championship. The NCAA announced through a spokesperson to ESPN Sunday that it had no plans to release a bracket, even though many wanted the governing body of college sports to do so.

And so we only have bracketologists like Lunardi to give us a glimpse of what might have been. Lunardi had Kansas as the top seed in his final bracket, followed by other region No. 1s Gonzaga, Baylor and Dayton. At No. 2, he had San Diego State, Florida State, Creighton and Kentucky, and Villanova as the top seed on the No. 3 line.

As far as the favorite, Lunardi went with Kansas, but with a caveat. He said he did not see an elite team in the field like Virginia last season, Villanova in 2018 or the Kentucky teams in 2015 or 2012.

“I thought when the very good teams had their Agame, Kansas had the biggest A,” Lunardi said. “They had a star at the point (Devonte Dotson) and a star in the middle (Udoka Azubuike) and they were just Kansas. But we all know that the team we think has the biggest A-game rarely wins. So I think it was wide open for a Florida State, Seton Hall maybe if they got it back going. I think Gonzaga was real and I think Dayton is really good, so who knows?”

We’ll also never know if the selection committee agreed with Lunardi and felt that Penn State deserved a spot in the field for the first time since 2011 or Rutgers since 1991. Hey, stranger things have happened. Remember Drexel in 2012? The Dragons were 25-6, won the CAA regular season title and lost in the conference final, but did not receive an atlarge bid to the NCAA tournament. Being in a major conference like the Big Ten helps, but it’s not a guarantee, especially with no conference tournaments to enhance an NCAA resume.

And so you feel for every team, but especially those like Dayton, Penn State, Rutgers and Hofstra, which won the CAA tournament title to earn its first trip to the Big Dance since 2001, when a fellow named Jay Wright was the head coach. How would those teams have fared?

The beauty of the NCAA tournament is the unknown. That’s why millions of people fill out brackets and follow it religiously every year. No one thought a No. 16 seed would knock off a No. 1 until UMBC stunned Virginia two years ago. Certainly no one predicted Butler would get to back-to-back championship games in 2010 and 2011 and a No. 5 and a No. 8 seed, respectively.

Dayton was having its best season in program history before the plug was pulled.

“Imagine had this happened the Thursday of Championship Week to Saint Joe’s and Jameer (Nelson)?” said Lunardi, referring to the 2004 SJU team that was 27-0 and ranked No. 1 before losing in the Atlantic 10 quarterfinals. “That’s what we’re talking about. (The Hawks) lost on Thursday afternoon in the A-10 tournament. If the A-10 tournament had been canceled on the same day it was this year, they would have finished No. 1 and 27-0. That would have been a once-ina-lifetime thing nipped in the bud.”