We're having a hard time thinking that Brown can be toppled now unless they actually lose a game. With St. Bonaventure having tied Walsh a week before, they lost their best chance at taking the #1 spot.
Now they'll have to do it in a playoff game.
We talked a bit about the playoff situation in NCR D1 in our latest article:
AIC Pushes Brown as Liberty Comes Down to Wire
Really the thing is, we usually see a small number of play-ins in NCR's playoffs. With a D1 Round of 8, you get eight teams, or seven plus two in a play-in, or six plus four in a play-in. You see how it works. The number of teams in the play-in is (X-Y)x2, where X is the number of teams in your official playoff round (in this case, 8) and Y is the number of spots you need a play-in for.
If you reverse that, you get Z/2=Y. Where Z is the number of teams we need in a play-in, and Y is the number of spaces we need to fill in the regular playoff round.
Right now we see the following: Notre Dame, Indiana, Thomas More, Marian, Brown, Dartmouth, AIC, St. Bonaventure, Walsh, Wheeling, Queens, and Belmont Abbey.
(By the way we did fix a rankings mistake where we got too excited about Indiana and overlooked their earlier loss to Marian. Thankfully, Marian beat Notre Dame to remind us to look at that.)
That's 12 teams, which is four more than what we need. So Y=4, which means Z=8 ... we would need eight teams in four play-ins. Hard to imagine NCR will do that. Since, apparently, the ARC has five teams in the playoffs per their agreement, that means Liberty, Big 10, Big Rivers, and others (Southern, Independents) have to fill only three spots. We make more spots with play-ins. But we could see Big Rivers getting only one spot, which would be harsh, or Liberty only getting two, which is also harsh. Big 10 gets only one? Maybe.
Or you expand it.
What about SNU, they're a maybe. Their win over Iowa Central was good but that result puts them about level with Aquinas. What about Lander or Wingate? Not now, not yet.
