With just one regular season game and the Pac-10 tournament remaining before selection Sunday, a hypothetical question was posed in the comments regarding our seeding chances at this point. Since I aim to please, I’ll go one step better and go through three hypothetical scenarios — in order of what I see as most likely to least likely — that represent a range of possibilities and break down how each might turn out on Selection Sunday.
Here’s the caveat, though: The tournament seeding process is something that’s so fluid, it’s hard to say with any certainty where a team will end up. It’s so heavily dependent on what other teams do, especially once you get outside the top two lines of seeds. Once you start getting below the 3 or 4 seed, they often move teams up or down a line to avoid the conflicts the rules tell them they have to avoid with the bracket. Additionally, I don’t even pretend to be a bracket expert. There’s a reason ESPN pays a guy to follow this thing full time and that the selection committee takes the better part of a week to put the bracket together.
Sooooo, with all that said, let’s first size up what we know.
