Believe it or not, we are nearing the end of the regular season, and postseason is fast approaching! This means it’s time to start thinking about regionals. As a reminder, qualification is based on NQS, which is calculated by taking a team’s top six scores of the season, at least three of which must be on the road, dropping the highest score overall, and averaging the remaining five.
Each year in this series we take a look at each “bubble” team’s highest possible NQS after this coming weekend’s slate and discuss what they’ll need to do to finish in the top 36 and make regionals. This week we’ll stick only to team discussion, adding in potential individual qualifiers next week.
Let’s start with a postseason bracket projection based on current standings, attempting to take geography into account. With the current rankings, there are two hosting conflicts among the top 16 seeds, so we switched No. 7 Michigan with No. 8 Michigan State and No. 11 Denver with No. 12 Arkansas. Teams in bold are located within 400 miles of a host site, so we have placed them accordingly (geography does not matter for the top 16 seeds). The remaining teams were placed using a mixture of geography and conference alignment (no more than four conference members at each…
