After a full weekend of college basketball, there has been a lot of movement in Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology on ESPN, but the Oregon Ducks have stayed put, despite going 1-1 against the LA schools last week.
For the second week in a row, the Ducks find themselves in the “next four out” section of Lunardi’s Bracketology rankings. After losing to UCLA on Saturday (their fourth loss in the last five games), the fact that Lunardi still has Oregon on the bubble is encouraging.
With nine games to go in the regular season, the Ducks are running out of room for error, and they have a tough road ahead of them. Oregon still has home matchups with Washington State, Colorado, and Utah, which will all be tough games, and they’ll have to travel to Tuscon to play Arizona in one of the last games of the season. Besides their second game against the Wildcats, almost all of the Ducks games will be must-win going forward, if they want a chance at making the NCAA tournament with an at-large bid.
Oregon is still hovering near second place in the Pac-12 standings, which has implications for the Ducks in the Pac-12 tournament. If Oregon doesn’t win enough of their remaining games to qualify for an at-large bid, there is always the automatic qualifier route to March Madness by winning the Pac-12 championship. If they maintain their standing in the conference, they’ll have a favorable seed for the Pac-12 tournament, which would make their route to a conference championship and automatic bid easier.
This week, the Ducks will take on the Washington schools for the second time this season. The first time around, Oregon handled the Huskies and the Cougars, but both of those games came before the Ducks’ downward slide. Lunardi placed Washington State as one of the “last teams in” in Tuesday’s update, so a win over the Cougars on Saturday could be substantial for Oregon.
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