With the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500 over, the next national sporting event of prominence is a month’s worth of bracket guessing away.
The Southeastern Conference will have five representatives in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, according to Monday’s bracket projection on CollegeRPI.com, but just three according to ESPN. Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Tennessee are entrenched in both 65-team estimates, while Florida (17-8, 6-4 SEC) and Ole Miss (17-7, 5-5) are the two in question.
Mississippi State (18-7, 6-4) is considered on the edge as well, but none of the coaches involved plan to stress the early bubble status to their teams.
“Zero discussion, and I mean absolutely zero,” Mississippi State’s Rick Stansbury said Monday. “You can’t waste time worrying about things you can’t control. All we can control is what happens between those lines. Worrying about what someone else thinks is an absolute waste of time.”
Florida and Mississippi State have the same SEC record through 10 games as last season. MSU’s Bulldogs took themselves out of NCAA tournament talk a year ago by slipping to 7-7 in the league but then won six straight games, including four in four days at the SEC tournament, to snatch the league’s automatic bid.