Hello to everyone, and hopefully you had a pleasant weekend. It was certainly pleasant for some of the teams at the lower reaches of the at-large field, while a few of our upper-level seeds had a break that was less than kind. Let’s go ahead and take a look at this week’s projections:

CHANGES AT THE TOP: Baylor’s stay on the 1-seed line was shorter than Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. The loss at Kansas wasn’t surprising (although the margin was somewhat so), but the loss at home to Missouri was fascinating, both as an indicator of the Tigers’ relative strength and a further indicator that the Bears perhaps aren’t a top-5 team after all. They’re still obviously very good, but it’s going to take some very high-level play down the stretch for us to seriously consider Baylor as a 1-seed again. UConn and Indiana both tumbled, with the Huskies taking more collateral damage due to an OOC loss at a poor Tennessee team. Indiana, for all their problems, did look impressive in beating Penn State this weekend, and the Nebraska loss looks a bit fluky in retrospect. Both UNC and Duke maintain their privileged 2-seed virtual-home-game bracketing, mostly because that’s what the committee will do, but also because they didn’t suffer bad enough losses to chase them down any further.

CONTENTS MAY SETTLE: You’ve likely noticed some jumps as far as team seeding from week to week, even without a lot of meaningful wins or losses. As I mentioned earlier, this is mostly me just calibrating the field based upon looking at it fresh each week. Some teams that looked good last week or two weeks ago (Gonzaga, St. Louis) don’t look so good, while others (Davidson, UNLV) start to look better upon closer inspection.

ROAD WINS: We’re finally starting to see some good road wins being collected, although they’re coming from unexpected places. Cincinnati has two of the best road wins on the year now, having won at both Georgetown and at UConn…yet the Bearcats also lost at home to Presbyterian. Florida State has a win at Duke, yet that same team lost at Clemson by 20. Minnesota won at Indiana, yet lost at home to Iowa. Missouri’s win at Baylor could end up being the best of them all, but only if Baylor doesn’t lose again at home. Because frankly, the Bears shouldn’t lose again at home — their one remaining high-quality home game is against Kansas.

LAST FOUR OUT: Northwestern finally fell out this week — although they still are right there on the bubble, the fact is that if the draw were held today, being 3 games under .500 in conference would keep them out. Arkansas made some nice progress in that win over Michigan, but they need to do more first. Southern Miss is close, but I still like Marshall’s overall resume better, despite the Herd’s loss to the Golden Eagles. And our fourth team out is Stanford…for whom I have little interesting to say.