The Midwest | Young and Restless
We open the previews with this brackets version of Weird Barbie
You probably noticed you only heard from me once last week1. Well, bad/good news time y’all: at minimum, you’re getting five items from me this week. Do with that as you will.
We begin with the Midwest Region, the Region I can’t really get a handle on. What we have, here, is a hodgepodge of teams put together whose association has no through-line. I don’t like most of the teams here, but there’s also a genuine “don’t have to squint that hard to see it” path to the Final Four for like eight teams here.
(Yeah, even *that* one.)
The major player features The Major Player, but there’s baggage galore here and spoilers lurking to prove it. A quick Midwest Region ahead of a busy week here at Sons of Pepe Sanchez HQ.
Midwest Region
3 Favorites - The ostensible favorites have to prove it. Purdue and Tennessee are not going to get the benefit of the doubt until they can prove that this contraption they’ve created can do what it’s supposed to do. Those are the top two seeds; the potential for schadenfreude is high, here, and that’s before you bring up any of the ghosts that seem to float ghoulishly around Matt Painter and Rick Barnes at all times.
Creighton hasn’t been quite as good this year as they were a year ago (giving them something in common with just about every team in the field), but a fully operational three-man game from Ryan Kalkbrenner, Trey Alexander and Baylor Scheierman is as formidable as Purdue’s Actual Goliath and Dalton Knecht.