{"id":32,"date":"2016-03-07T12:32:26","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T18:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/2016-swac-tournament-preview\/"},"modified":"2016-03-07T12:32:26","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T18:32:26","slug":"2016-swac-tournament-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2016-swac-tournament-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"2016 SWAC tournament preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Southwestern Athletic Conference<br \/>\nMarch 8-12. All games at Houston.<br \/>\nkPOY: Chris Thomas, Texas Southern.<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nThe SWAC gets underway on Tuesday with two first-round games at the Toyota Center.<\/p>\n<p>Hey, for once Grambling is not the team with the lowest chance of winning the SWAC tournament. In fact, the Tigers\u2019 chances are equivalent to what Austin Peay\u2019s were in the OVC tournament, which officially makes them realistic if highly unlikely. After starting 2-0 in SWAC play, they finished dead last at 4-14, but as Tigers\u2019 fans will tell you, that was quite deceptive. They were in nearly every game and their last seven losses were by a combined 21 points. There are fully six college basketball teams ranked worse than Grambling this season, and although none of those teams are in the SWAC, the 10-seed allows Grambling to avoid powerhouse Texas Southern until a potential showdown in the championship game.<\/p>\n<p>The conference as a whole climbed out of the Division-I basement for the first time since 2003. An for the 20th consecutive season, the SWAC awarded an outright regular-season title. That went to Texas Southern, despite the Tigers going 1-11 in non-conference play. The most impressive non-conference performance was registered by Southern, who went 8-5 and registered a Tier A win with their victory at #73 Mississippi State. The Jags also won at Wyoming and gave Memphis a legit scare. But that was then and this is now. Mike Davis\u2019s team is a significant favorite to make its third consecutive NCAA tournament.<\/p>\n<pre>                           Qtrs Semis Final Champ\n 1 Texas Southern           100  86.8  63.9  49.2\n 3 Jackson St.              100  74.4  50.4  19.5\n 4 Southern                 100  55.9  19.1  11.2\n 2 Alcorn St.               100  70.9  31.2   8.8\n 5 Alabama St.              100  44.1  12.8   6.7\n 6 Prairie View A&amp;M         100  25.6  11.0   2.0\n 8 Alabama A&amp;M             65.1  10.1   3.5   1.4\n 7 Mississippi Valley St.  51.0  15.0   3.9   0.6\n10 Grambling St.           49.0  14.1   3.5   0.5\n 9 Arkansas Pine Bluff     34.9   3.1   0.7   0.2\n\n<\/pre>\n<p><u><strong>SWAC tourney records (since 1999)<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n<pre>Texas Southern         18-11\nAlabama St.            20-13\nAlcorn St.             14-10\nSouthern               13-11\nArkansas Pine Bluff     9- 8\nJackson St.            16-15\nAlabama A&amp;M             8-11\nMississippi Valley St. 10-14\nPrairie View A&amp;M        8-13\nGrambling St.           5-15\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Southwestern Athletic Conference March 8-12. All games at Houston. kPOY: Chris Thomas, Texas Southern. The SWAC gets underway on Tuesday with two first-round games at the Toyota Center. Hey, for once Grambling is not the team with the lowest chance of winning the SWAC tournament. In fact, the Tigers\u2019 chances are equivalent to what Austin [&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\/32"}],"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=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}