BYU basketball lands a tough draw in official NCAA Tournament bracket

The gurus of Selection Sunday have spoken and the NCAA Tournament field is officially set. BYU basketball is officially a tournament team, and they’ll be able to validate their recent stellar play with a win-or-go home tournament.

Here’s the problem, though, upon the reveal of their bracket, it was clear that the Cougars didn’t exactly win the lottery with their path through the field.

Landing a 6 seed isn’t the best-case scenario for a BYU team aspiring to climb as high as 5, but the university’s “No Sunday Play” policy takes priority and often affects the Cougars’ standing in the final field of 68.

Spreading the (Common) Wealth

But the 6-seed is the least of BYU’s problems, because they drew a first-round collision course with the Atlantic-10 Conference champion, VCU.

The VCU Rams are a storied squad in the history of March Madness. Disruptors, upsetters, and tough, hard-nosed hoopers make up the Virginia Commonwealth Identity, and that history alone carries tremendous weight in this team’s value as an underdog against a BYU program whose tournament history has been frankly pitiful overall.

Let me put it this way. Historically, VCU has done less with more, and BYU vice versa. Case in point: in 2011, the 11-seeded VCU Rams ran all the way to the Final Four while 3-seeded BYU was snagged in their Sweet-16 overtime bout with Florida. The Cougars have never reached the semifinal round. Period.

But history isn’t the only reason to crank up the upset danger dial closer to 10. While BYU has been touted as one of the hottest in basketball (prior to their spanking courtesy of Houston), VCU has likewise crept under the radar as the mid-major program with the fastest-swinging momentum pendulum.

Winning 18 of their last 20 games on the way to a conference championship win, the Rams have only dropped six games all season.

BYU will need to pick themselves up from a disheartening defeat at the hands of the number-one seed Houston. VCU is riding high on a tsunami of momentum.

If the Cougars can escape their first round meeting, the road doesn’t get much easier, either. A possible second-round battle with Big 10 tournament runner-up Wisconsin, and the likes of Saint Mary’s, Alabama, Arizona, and Duke awaiting in the later rounds.

Will BYU be a popular upset pick in later rounds? Potentially, and a loss to a Houston team that may well be the best team in the entire nation shouldn’t detract from that.

A tough, while navigable, path through their corner of the bracket should give BYU fans plenty about which to speculate in the coming days.