February fever

Oh yeah … February is here and the final 25 days leading up to Selection Sunday/Matchup Monday are just going to get more and more crazy.

Some of you don’t even check in here until February begins, and while we certainly welcome you, where have you been? You’ve missed a lot. But we have a lot to get to, as well.

Don’t forget, these tournaments expanded last year. There are 59 men’s teams heading to the NCAA Tournament — 37 automatic bids, three Pool B bids which are set aside for teams not in those conferences, and 19 at-large bids for the teams remaining. In women’s action, there are 63 teams going: 39 conferences have automatic bids, four Pool B bids are set aside and there are 20 at-large bids.

New automatic bids go to the North Eastern Athletic Conference men and women and the Great South Athletic Conference women. The new Northern Athletics Conference won’t be eligible for an automatic bid until 2009.

Remember, too, the NCAA is only going to give us the names of the teams in the tournament on Selection Sunday. They can’t come up with pairings on Sunday anymore, so we’ve dubbed the following day, the day we get the brackets, as Matchup Monday.

It’s a little early to give a good read as to who’s on the bubble, though I did get a call from the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun this afternoon and gave them my thoughts on a scenario they proposed in which Wittenberg fails to beat Wooster both this weekend and in the NCAC final. (I suggested it would probably be 50-50.)

We still have about 3,000 games left to be played. It’s going to be wild.