One (or more) key indicator of wins and losses for every team in the 2024 NCAA Tournament
It does what it says on the tin
If you’re a long(er) time follower, you may know that I preview every University of Tennessee men’s basketball game. For some this is probably the world’s most annoying exercise, but they’re a 2 seed and #6 overall in national title odds this year, so whatever. But! If you’re not as familiar with that, you may not know that at the end of every article, there’s little sub-sections with key matchups and the like. Most important: there’s Three Things to Watch For.
As part of this week’s coverage, I’ve promised and written a lot, but I wanted this to be one last giant piece before we get into the daily previews of Thursday-Sunday. (And so I can finally stop writing national content after tomorrow morning and get the Tennessee preview in the bag.) This will cover 1-2 key trends I’ve found for all 68 teams in the field. It may be 67 or even 66 when this publishes, so apologies. I wanted to get to three for each but time constraints this week have killed me.
Will these help you win a bracket pool? Maybe, maybe not. Actually, they absolutely will not. But! More importantly, you can look for three specific things in every team’s game(s) that provide as key indicators of a future win/loss. Plus, if hypothetical matchups come to fruition, you can come back here to review the #stats and #analysis and build your takes well ahead of time.
Just like everything data-centric this week, this post is paywalled. Look, like it or not, this has been a tremendous week for driving people to sign up for the full package. You keep doing this and stick around for a whole year, and the fantasy of this being a full-time job becomes less of a fantasy and more of a distant reality. So, yeah, $18/year.
Jump! This post is nearly 4,300 words long, so dive in.