As I noted last night, BYU has more of a claim on a #1 seed right now than Texas does, but there are probably still four teams ahead of the likely Mountain West regular season champs. Regardless, they're in line for no worse than a #2 seed, and they should be no worse than 6th on the S-Curve barring wackiness.

Why is that a big deal? As I also noted last night, this puts BYU in excellent shape to stay in their natural region and play their games in Denver and, if they make it that far, Anaheim. Usually we're talking about the best team in the Pac 10 (or sometimes Gonzaga) fighting to stay out west, not the MWC. However, proximity isn't always enough.

After the selected teams are ranked 1-68 on S-Curve, the committee places them into the bracket one seed line at a time using the S-Curve order. (Review the procedures for a refresher.) The guidelines are general and sometimes difficult to apply for bracket predictions, but two stand out in this case:

• A top priority for the committee is to achieve reasonable competitive balance in each region of the bracket.
• Teams will remain in or as close to their areas of natural interest as possible... If two teams from the same natural region are in contention for the same bracket position, the team ranked higher in the seed list shall remain in its natural region.

The second guideline is easier to satisfy. With the regular season sweep of San Diego State, even a loss in the MWC tournament may leave BYU ranked above the Aztecs on the S-Curve. No other team with Anaheim as its closest region is anywhere close on the S-Curve.

The first guideline (deemed a "top priority") is why it is important for BYU to be one of the top #2 seeds if they are not a #1. (If BYU is a #1 seed, the Denver to Anaheim route is a fait accompli.)

All other #1 seed candidates will hail from east of the Rockies, so the lowest of the four would be relegated to Anaheim. As the committee places teams in each seed line, they look to maintain balance by summing the S-Curve ranks of the teams in each region to ensure that no "severe numerical imbalance" exists.

With the worst #1 seed in Anaheim (and ranked 4th on the S-Curve), a #2 BYU seed ranked 5th or 6th on the S-Curve will go a long way to ensuring the Cougars will not be moved out of the west to ensure balance across the bracket.

Last (but certainly not least for the NCAA), the Denver pod and Anaheim regional are each scheduled for Thursday and Saturday games this year, so there are no concerns about BYU's no Sunday games policy.

Whether there is any real difference in being a #1 seed or a #2 seed is a topic for another post.

I'll use this more over the last 17 days before Selection Sunday, but tonight I'll just post the BubbleGrid without comment. (See this to learn what it's all about.)

• Hover over a value for more information
• Shaded teams are predicted to be in the field
• Teams with a * are the projected automatic qualifier (AQ) for their conference. Bold shaded teams have clinched the AQ berth
• Teams are listed in order of their selection confidence by the CTD model. In other words, the last shaded non-AQ team is the last team in, and the first non-shaded team is the first team out.

Though there is a cluster of bubble teams hovering around the .500 mark in the Big 10, and it's tempting to think about bids in terms of conferences, the committee has said time and time again that's not how it works. Teams get bids, not conferences.

At the request of umhoops.com, let's look at one of these teams: the Michigan Wolverines.

• 7 wins vs. RPI top 100 (7-9 overall)
• 3 road wins vs. RPI top 100 (best at #51 Michigan State)

• .500 vs. RPI top 200
• Conference record under .500
• 1 win vs. RPI top 50 (home win vs. #44 Harvard)
• Loss to #156 Indiana

Conference record is not the magic number many make it out to be. A losing conference record is more likely than not to keep a team out of the field, but a winning record certainly does not guarantee a spot.

In the 11 years of data I have, 62 of 416 teams (15%) in the six BCS conferences with a conference record (including conference tournament games) of .500 or better failed to make the field. (Another, Mississippi State, won the SEC tournament in 2009, but based on their #13 seed probably wouldn't have been selected at-large.)

On the other side, only 12 of 224 (5%) BCS conference teams with losing conference records and were selected at-large. Ten of those were only one game under .500.

The caveat with this, of course, is that it is more difficult with three extra at-large slots to compare hard thresholds like these with previous seasons.

Crashing the Dance currently has Michigan as the fifth team out. The Wolverines' profile is certainly not strong enough to survive a sub-.500 conference record, and unless one of their remaining wins is agasints Wisconsin, a 10-8 finish might be necessary to absorb an early Big 10 tourney loss.

For now, I say out.

I'm certainly not the first person to come to this conclusion, but the North Carolina offense has been demonstrably better since Kendall Marshall replaced Larry Drew II as the starting point guard.

The esteemed John Gasaway lays out the case (ESPN Insider required) for a greatly improved Tar Heel team. I certainly don't want to pilfer data without proper attribution (and who knew ESPN had a corrections page?), so I'll direct you there to read his argument. I will, however, add a few small bits.

Frequent readers of this site (all four of you) know I like to use a metric called NEM (background here), derived from Ken Pomeroy's adjusted efficiency numbers, to look at game-by-game performance.

Here is a look at the NEM trend for Duke and North Carolina (five-game running average). Five games is a somewhat arbitrary selection, and it just so happens that Carolina's recent hot streak is five games, but it balances showing recent trends and smoothing the randomness inherent in single game performance.

It's always dangerous to draw conclusions from small samples, but with the personnel changes both teams have experienced this year there may be something there. (For the record, I agree with Ken Pomeroy's laptop.)

Conventional wisdom says that a young team like the Tar Heels (who rank 311th of 345 in experience) will suffer in an environment like Cameron Indoor Stadium. In general, I think that young teams do tend to struggle more on the road.

However, there are exceptions, including one in this very rivalry. Flash back to 2006 when a young Tar Heel team, with freshman Bobby Frasor at point guard (and some other freshman you may have heard of), stunned J.J. Redick and Shelden Williams on senior day.

And on this Super Bowl Sunday, how was the freshman planning to celebrate his record-setting performance? By looking ahead--with a nod to history, of course. "I've got game film from when Bobby Frasor was a freshman and played at Duke that I'm going to watch tonight," Marshall said. "I want to see what it was like for him and how he handled it."

And, yes, I have been to Cameron before.