Can the Houston Cougars carry the third longest active winning streak in to their 5th straight Sweet 16….. or beyond?
Sick of hard-hitting analysis of the 2025 NCAA Tournament? Up to your eyeballs in expert picks chock-full of astute takes on players to watch and budding upsets?
Fear not, friends: your pals at Anonymous Eagle are here to inject some half-baked, homespun “insight” into the proceedings, with our (mostly) annual region-by-region tour, as we go Anonymously Through the Brackets.
For each region, we’ll give you our patented Anonymous Eagle Half-Arsed Analysis with: a gutless pick to win the region; a sleeper regional champ; a CRUSH YOUR MAN upset special; a player/team we’d pay to watch; a player most likely to carry his team singlehandedly to the Sweet 16; and the best player in the region that you’ve never heard of before.
Let’s see what Bracketville has in store
GUTLESS WONDER Pick To Win The Region
If it came down to just which head coach do you trust, do you pick Kelvin Sampson or Rick Barnes?
It’s Kelvin Sampson in a heartbeat, right?
We’re going with Sampson’s #1 seeded Houston Cougars over Barnes’ #2 seeded Tennessee Volunteers.
CHEX BOLD PARTY MIX Bold Pick To Win The Region
If you go entirely by the computers, then Gonzaga has to be right there with Houston and Tennessee as favorites to win the region. KenPom.com has Houston at #3, Tennessee at #5…… and Gonzaga at #9. They’re all right there next to each other. Going entirely by the NET, the NCAA’s own sorting tool? #3, #5, #8.
And yet, the Bulldogs are the #8 seed here. Why? Because they went 10-8 in Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 2 games this season. If you’re going by “who did you beat and where did you beat them,” it’s hard to say that this is wrong for Gonzaga. The computers say that they would be favored against anyone in this region except for the top two seeds, and even then, those games would be toss ups.
I know, I know, history says maaaaaaaybe don’t trust the Zags.
But this is the BOLD PICK section! Trust the Zags.
CRUSH YOUR MAN Upset Special
Okay, the obvious answer here is the 5/12 game, because former LSU and VCU head coach Will Wade is coaching McNeese and he has a record of 57-10 in two seasons with the Cowboys. You’re probably going to get a lot of people being aware of that fact as well as just the natural “gotta pick a 5/12 game here somewhere.”
Instead, I’m going to give you a different game, one that’s going to provide an awful lot of entertainment value if this upset comes in. I want to be clear about this: Purdue has done enough this season to deserve their #4 seed in the tournament. However, the Boilermakers have just not figured out how to defend inside the three-point arc now that Zach Edey is suiting up for the Memphis Grizzlies. They are #350 in the country in two-point shooting defense and #356 in block rate.
And High Point, their first round opponent, is the #15 two-point shooting percentage team in the country. The Panthers are not really doing this with overpowering size, but 6’8”, 225 Kimani Hamilton is shooting just short of 60% on twos this season. Maybe Caleb Furst can figure out how to slow Hamilton down here, but if Furst was catching on at defending the paint, wouldn’t he have figured that out by now?
#13 High Point sending #4 Purdue home early, restarting many many jokes about the Boilermakers losing in the first round.
Player I’d Pay To Watch
I admittedly don’t watch a ton of Tennessee basketball, mostly due to the hierarchy of “is Marquette on? What about a Big East game?” making my first and second choices for me. But I know that 1) Tennessee is very good and 2) Zakai Zeigler is very good and 3) Zakai Zeigler is very small.
I would like to be able to see Zeigler play in person to try to figure out exactly how KenPom.com thinks he is one of the 10 most valuable players in the country even though he is just three apples high listed at just 5’9”. It sounds like a kind of wizardry, and watching someone defy the conventional logic of the sport — be tall and athletic! — is always worth the price of admission.
The Chiropractor Special: aka Who Can Put The Team On His Back?
It’s usually a safe bet that at least one First Four team is going to get through to at least the Round of 32. Marquette fans just watched Xavier’s Ryan Conwell throw in 38 points on 13-for-18 shooting in the Big East tournament, including a monster day from long range with 7 makes on 11 attempts. Zach Freemantle is still the team’s leading scorer, even after that outburst, but it’s those kinds of outbursts can can be good enough to get Xavier from Dayton on Wednesday to Milwaukee on Sunday in a second round contest. That’s not an otherworldly shooting night for Conwell either, as he’s connecting on nearly 42% of his threes this season. Just hitting for his average on enough attempts might just be enough.
Best Guy You’ve Never Heard Of
Tayton Conerway is the first Troy Trojan to ever be named Sun Belt Player of the Year, so he’s an entire deal. The senior from Burleson, Texas, averaged a team highs in both points (14.3 per game) and assists (4.8/game) along with an SBC high 2.9 steals per game as well. He’s letting it fly a little too much from behind the arc season with a success rate of just 28%, but so’s his entire team, to be honest. That might change in their first round game against Kentucky at Fiserv Forum, as the Wildcats are deep into the back end of the two-point defense in the country.
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