Cinderella is the Poison Pill of Championship Week

We all love Cinderella in March Madness but Al Dannity says the slipper could cut NCAA Basketball dreams to shreds in Championship Week.

It’s not the same as the Madness but Championship Week is important for the bulk of teams with their eyes on the Big Dance. For one-bid leagues the motives are obvious, win or leave your fancy duds in the closet for next year. One you get outside of that zone, things get a little more complicated.

Nobody wants an extra bad loss on their resume at this time of year. Win the regular season but lose to a 6-10 team in the first round? Well that’s at least one line down the pile you go in the seeding for the NCAA Tournament. On the bubble? Oh boy, you really don’t want to lose to anyone worse than .500 in regular season play.

It’s already happening. While the mid-major tournaments have seen the majority of bottom feeders cast off, one team is still on course for a string of shocks. Loyola Marymount (LMU) went 1-15 in the regular season of the West Coast Conference (WCC). Tonight they take on Santa Clara, with a 9-7 WCC record and 21-10 on the season. The Broncos don’t have a shot at an at-large bit but they are all that stands between the Lions and a shot to cause chaos. Should LMU win tonight, they’ll face the national #1 Gonzaga. Now we don’t make predictive lines on NCAA Basketball betting but it’s safe to say the Lions would be heavy double-digit underdogs. If the Bulldogs lose, they can wave goodbye to a #1 seed and would drop to at best a #3 seed. Admittedly a loss to Santa Clara would do similar damage so let’s take this a step further. St Mary’s are seeded to face Gonzaga in the WCC final. Should the Gaels progress, their resume would probably be just good enough to make the cut even without taking the conference auto-bid. That is, unless they somehow face LMU. Then we enter crazy territory, as if LMU theoretically winning four games to making the tournament final didn’t have us there already. The Gaels would be thrust into a must-win situation. A loss to LMU, even in the conference final, would be a killer bad loss to absorb in their final game of the season.

Let’s step back to the realm of sanity for a minute. The LMU situation is the world of fantasy. Look however at the ACC, the Big East, and the SEC. All three conferences, especially the latter, feature a crop of teams on the bubble right now. Any loss to a team that went below .500 in the regular season would be fatal. A loss to a team that was really bad, I’m talking 3-13 territory, would even have the NIT saying “do we have to take you?” That’s the world we are in until Selection Sunday, or at least the Friday before when the fear of such a bad loss should be off the table. It’s going to be a tense week.