Bracketology Busters: Memphis Blues

Each week, ESPN's Joe Lunardi predicts the NCAA tournament field if the season ended today. While he's good at this, Lunardi only focuses on past performance, and wins and losses. Bracketology Busters looks at which teams should be expected to perform significantly better or worse than their projected seeds.

This week in Bracketology Busters we'll look at a couple teams that are both currently projected to be No. 2 seeds, but are going in dramatically different directions at this stage of the year. Today, it's a team that was front and center a year ago, but has been largely ignored this season despite performing at a similarly high level.

Memphis | Current Seed: 2 | Status: Underrated

You don't have to look too hard to figure out why the Tigers have flown under the radar for much of this season. After coming within inches of the national championship last year they lost their three best players, Derrick Rose, Chris Douglas-Roberts, and Joey Dorsey.

But even more important to their perception -- they were ranked 13th in the preseason AP poll -- was their performance over the first two months of the season. Since they don't play in a prominent conference, Memphis has to be impressive enough in their early season non-conference games to keep the hype machine rolling when Conference USA play gets underway in January.

Last season, of course, that's exactly what happened. The Tigers were 13-0 heading into conference play, with wins over Oklahoma, Connecticut, USC, Georgetown, and Arizona. Their dominance continued until late February, when they lost to Tennessee in one of the most anticipated games of the regular season.

This season couldn't have been more different. Memphis failed to notch any notable wins in their non-conference schedule, losing to Xavier, Georgetown, and Syracuse. The Tigers even fell out of the AP poll altogether after that third loss, and were faced with the prospect of entering C-USA play in relative obscurity.

Well, that didn't happen. After the Syracuse loss, coach John Calipari decided to move freshman Tyreke Evans over to point guard. It'd be hard to prove the causation, but the correlation between the move and the team's success is indisputable; the Tigers haven't lost in the last two months, winning 18 straight contests.

It hasn't just been the fact that they keep emerging victorious, but rather the fashion in which they've done it.

The most impressive performance was a dominant 68-50 road win over a very solid Gonzaga team. Memphis' stellar defense -- which has risen to first in the country in Ken Pomeroy's ratings, and by a pretty substantial margin -- was on display against the Zags, limiting them to just 50 points over 62 possessions.

And the Tigers' dominance certainly hasn't been limited to that one performance.



It's easy to gloss over that 12-0 C-USA record, but doing that ignores two important aspects of the streak. First, while none of their conference opponents are big time programs, Conference USA is hardly a slouch of a conference. UAB, Houston, Tulsa, and UTEP may not be particularly intimidating teams, but neither are Maryland, Providence, and Arkansas. Still, that didn't stop the latter three teams from beating North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and a full-strength Oklahoma, respectively. Even when you don't face premium talent every night, it's tough to not slip up even once, and that's what Memphis has managed to do.

The other impressive part of the Tigers' performance in conference play has been the margin of their victories. After 12 conference games, they've outscored their C-USA foes by an average of 18.5 points per game. That's slightly worse than last season's mark of 20.3, but when you consider their performance in non-conference games in 2009 -- the previously referenced Gonzaga win, and winning at Tennessee by two -- and compare it to last year, when they split two home games against those same opponents, Memphis has been just as impressive in early 2009 as it was over the first couple months of '08.

The Tigers visit C-USA's second place team, UAB, Thursday night in what should be an excellent matchup. That'll be a good barometer of just how good they are, but regardless of the result, Memphis definitely isn't a team the Tar Heels, Panthers, or any other No. 1 seed would want to see across from them on Selection Sunday.