As you can imagine, winning moves the Orange up in the brackets. Losing does the opposite. The Orange have been losing, so they've been dropping ever so slightly.
So this weekend wasn't exactly the result that we all wanted. In our last update, even after the Louisville loss, the Syracuse Orange were still in line for an eighth or ninth seed, and set for a single bye in the ACC Tournament.
As of Sunday night, the only bracket that reflects Syracuse's loss to Pitt is USA Today, and they have Jim Boeheim's squad at a 10-seed in the Midwest, playing its first game against the USC Trojans. The top seed over there is Kansas, with Michigan State as the second seed.
CBS and ESPN haven't updated their mocks yet, but I'm guessing it will be more of the same, especially from ESPN since Joe Lunardi has been selling the Orange short all season in his projections (at least compared to everyone else).
As for the ACC Tournament, the loss slips the Orange down to an eight seed, which would set up an opening Wednesday night game against Virginia Tech and then a Thursday game with the one seed North Carolina Tar Heels. (Gulp)
***
Moral of the story: if you didn't read John's weekend post, making the NCAA Tournament just got a lot harder. Last week, I said a split of the final four games would set the stage for the Orange to go dancing at 20 regular season wins. That 20 win profile just got a lot more difficult to hit, and winning a couple in the ACC Tournament to seal the deal is also looking problematic at this point.
If the Orange finish with 21 wins (go 2-1 down the stretch, 1-1 in ACC Tourney), I think they're a solidly in "bubble" team (meaning we hear all about them going into Selection Sunday). Anything worse than that? Big trouble.
