Senior guard Corey Davis Jr. has led the Cougars on offense, but the team’s defensive play has been its strength. | Kathryn Lenihan/The Daily Cougar
March Madness is just a month away, and news outlets have started to publish bracket predictions for collegiate sports’ most exciting tournament of the year.
Some of the top predictors in the business have predicted the No. 13/13 Cougars will play in Tulsa in multiple brackets, and the team should hold a top four seed in one of the four regional brackets.
As long as the team’s success continues, the Cougars will get to face mostly lower seeds until the third rounds or later.
The NCAA tournament selection process gives 32 seeds to the winner of each NCAA Division I conference. The committee gives the remaining 36 seeds to the best remaining teams that did not win their conference.
The teams are then seeded to make the brackets reasonably balanced. The locations are picked to put teams close to home, but if there are too many teams from a region, then some teams will have to be moved far away.
Andy Katz‘s bracket on NCAA.com has Houston playing the first round in Tulsa in a bracket with Loyola-Chicago, Iowa and the winner of USF versus Butler in the play-in.
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi has placed UH in Salt Lake City and his bracket has Houston lined up to face Grand Canyon in the first round and Iowa and Wofford as potential round two opponents.
Shelby Mast has picked UH to play Radford in Tulsa with Iowa and Saint John’s on the other side of the mini-bracket. Mast is bracketologist for USA Today.
Tulsa continues to be a hot spot for the Cougars, as CBS’s Jerry Palm has picked the team to play the New Mexico State Aggies in the first round with a matchup against Kansas State Wildcats as a possible second round game.
SB Nation’s Chris Dobbertean is the first of these brackets to put Houston far from home. Dobbertean has picked Houston to travel to Salt Lake City to face Vermont in the first round and then either Wisconsin or Murray State in the second.
Finally, Bleacher Report’s Kerry Miller has also sent the Cougars to face the Aggies, but his matchup has UH traveling to San Jose for the game as well as Louisville and Lipscomb.
