NCAA.com's Andy Katz scored an interview with selection committee chair Bernard Muir, who gave him an exclusive look into where things stand days away from Selection Sunday.
You can watch the complete interview in the video above. Here are a few choice insights from Muir that give us a look inside the committee’s process and where the field of 68 stands:
- There are seven teams in contention for a No. 1 seed right now.
- Muir told Katz that 28 of the 36 at-large teams are tentatively in place. Add that to the 12 automatic qualifiers so far, and you’ve got 40 of the 68 teams accounted for.
- Nothing is set in stone yet. “We feel like we’re in a good place,” Muir said. “But we still know we have much more work to come and we know there’s going to be a lot of movement because, as you know, every game counts.”
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We don't know who those top seven teams are but we can take an educated guess. In fact, in his latest full bracket prediction earlier this week, Katz took a shot at it himself. He had Gonzaga, Virginia, Kentucky, and Duke on the top line, with North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan State, and LSU as 2 seeds. Those first six teams are very likely part of the seven that Muir mentioned, but the question is whether LSU or Michigan State is the seventh.
There’s still plenty of work to be done as conference tournaments wrap up in the next three days, both for teams and the committee itself. Though Muir gave us a great inside look, we won’t know the full field until Sunday night, when it is announced live on March Madness Live and broadcast nationally on CBS at 6 p.m. Eastern.
