Selection Sunday contenders: Who will represent these leagues in the NCAA tournament?

We’re less than a week away from Selection Sunday, and the excitement is brewing! Several conferences have already crowned their tournament champions, teams that will represent those leagues in the NCAA tournament later this month.

Here, we’ll take a dive into several of those teams. This includes a few fun stories, as well as looks into possible Cinderella contenders.

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Don’t Dismiss Drake

We’ll start with the winner of the Missouri Valley Conference tournament (otherwise known as “Arch Madness”). The Drake Bulldogs topped Bradley 63-48 Sunday in St. Louis, and they’ll spend the next week wondering where they’ll wind up in the field of 68.

Drake finished the regular season with a 30-3 mark, and the squad’s resume includes wins over major-conference foes Kansas State, Vanderbilt, and Miami. Their recipe for success isn’t a complicated one: They guard like crazy. The Bulldogs allowed just 58.8 points per game coming into Sunday. That’s good for second-best in the country, behind only Houston, and that number came down following Sunday’s brilliant performance.

Bradley, which finishes its campaign with a 26-8 mark, is no joke. Some fans online wondered aloud if the Missouri Valley Conference should be a two-bid league. However, the Braves shot just 5-for-20 from three-point range in the title game (and were also out-rebounded 32-19). If Drake is allowed to control the tempo, they could prove to be a very tough out.

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High Point Makes History

Next, we’ll head to the Big South, where one team will appear in its first-ever Division I NCAA Tournament. That’s High Point, which hadn’t advanced to the Big Dance since moving up from Division II prior to the 1999-2000 season.

This changed Sunday, as the Panthers rallied to defeat Winthrop. High Point was down as many as 15 points early in the second half, but used a 27-6 run to turn the tide. Bobby Pettiford scored a team-high 17 points off the bench, and High Point’s bench as a whole contributed 50 of the team’s points. It’s the third time this season High Point topped Winthrop, but the other two victories came by far more decisive margins. 

High Point has racked up the wins going into its first NCAA Tournament at the D1 level. They’re 29-5 on the season, and Sunday’s performance by the Panthers’ bench was no fluke. Eleven players average at least 10 minutes per game, so depth isn’t an issue. The questions here have to do with their schedule. High Point has yet to play a team from a traditional power conference. That’s almost certain to change in the tournament’s first round (unless they get sent to the First Four games in Dayton next Tuesday and Wednesday, which seems unlikely).

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Omaha Didn’t Need to Win, But Did Anyway

We’ll finish this one off with a pretty bizarre story. Over in the Summit League, Omaha squared off with St. Thomas-Minnesota, a team that recently made a big jump from Division III to Division I. In fact, because of the recency of that jump, the Tommies were ineligible for this year’s NCAA Tournament.

Because of this, Omaha was guaranteed a tournament berth regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s conference championship game. The Mavericks, though, punched their ticket to the Big Dance the old-fashioned way, with an 85-75 win. The game was close for most of the first half, but Omaha used a 12-2 run that lasted for the first few minutes of the second stanza to break the game open.

Omaha was led by JJ White, who scored a game-high 29 points, and Marquel Sutton, who added 22 points, 18 rebounds, and four blocks. The Mavericks also won the Summit League’s regular-season crown with a 13-3 league record. They had split their prior two meetings with St. Thomas prior to Sunday’s rubber match.