{"id":1605,"date":"2017-03-03T11:28:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T17:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/?p=1605"},"modified":"2017-03-03T12:10:24","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T18:10:24","slug":"2017-southern-conference-tournament-forecast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2017-southern-conference-tournament-forecast\/","title":{"rendered":"2017 Southern Conference tournament forecast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Southern Conference<\/strong>\u00a0(conference rank: 13th)<br \/>\nMarch 3-6<br \/>\nAll games at Asheville, N.C.<br \/>\n<strong>kPOY:<\/strong> TJ Cromer,\u00a0East Tennessee State<br \/>\n<strong>Regular season champ:<\/strong>\u00a0Furman (preseason #220 \/ 5th SoCon, current #106, UNC Greensboro (preseason #176 \/ 3rd SoCon, current #121), and East Tennessee State (preseason #182 \/ 4th SoCon, current #69)<br \/>\n<strong>Overachiever: <\/strong>East Tennessee State<br \/>\n<strong>Underachiever:<\/strong>\u00a0VMI (preseason #266, current #327)<\/p>\n<p>The SoCon is the feel good conference story of the season, achieving a rank of 13th which ties their highest since 2002. The other season that happened was 2008, when Davidson went 20-0 in league play and ended up a bucket from the Final Four despite being a ten-seed.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This season has no Davidson, obviously. The program itself left for the Atlantic 10 three seasons ago and there&#8217;s no potential Final Four team in the league. It&#8217;s just got a lot of solid mid-major programs.\u00a0Eight of the ten teams improved on their preseason rating, with East Tennessee State, Furman, and Samford massively outpacing their preseason projections.<\/p>\n<p>That makes this tournament one of the more wide-open events in the first week. Besides the two military schools and Western Carolina, the other seven teams are all capable of a run. There was a three-way tie for the regular-season title but the tiebreakers sent what appears to be the conference&#8217;s strongest team, East Tennessee State, to the three-seed. The Bucs led the conference in both two-point percentage offense and defense during SoCon play.<\/p>\n<p>No matter, it&#8217;s not like home-court advantage was at stake. All games are played at the decidedly neutral U.S. Cellular Center in Asheville which is a good way to decide the conference crown when there&#8217;s this much parity.<\/p>\n<pre><b>                       Qtrs Semis Final Champ<\/b>\r\n 3 East Tennessee St.   100  71.2  48.5  33.4\r\n 1 UNC Greensboro       100  86.1  43.1  17.5\r\n 2 Furman               100  67.2  28.6  15.9\r\n 4 Chattanooga          100  59.5  35.1  15.7\r\n 5 Wofford              100  40.5  19.8   7.1\r\n 6 Mercer               100  28.8  13.3   6.1\r\n 7 Samford             84.5  31.3   9.5   4.0\r\n 9 The Citadel         59.8   8.4   1.2   0.1\r\n 8 Western Carolina    40.2   5.6   0.8   0.07\r\n10 VMI                 15.5   1.5   0.1   0.02<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Southern Conference\u00a0(conference rank: 13th) March 3-6 All games at Asheville, N.C. kPOY: TJ Cromer,\u00a0East Tennessee State Regular season champ:\u00a0Furman (preseason #220 \/ 5th SoCon, current #106, UNC Greensboro (preseason #176 \/ 3rd SoCon, current #121), and East Tennessee State (preseason #182 \/ 4th SoCon, current #69) Overachiever: East Tennessee State Underachiever:\u00a0VMI (preseason #266, current #327) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1605"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1618,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}