Your Weekly Bracket

It's January. It's Big East season. So what does that mean? Pundits speculating about the NCAA Tournament, of course.
Notre Dame looked to be in good position before it got pasted by Marquette 92-66 on Saturday. It was the Irish's first road game and while it was against one of the best two teams in the league -- Georgetown being the other -- the loss left questions as to whether or not Notre Dame can thrive or wilt under road pressure.
ESPN still has Notre Dame on the No. 8 line -- facing Arkansas in Omaha, Neb. -- but if the Irish won they'd have a game against No. 1 Kansas fairly close to Lawrence.
The Bracket Project consensus has the Irish as a No. 9 seed -- not in too much danger but a couple bad losses could change that. Good wins could obviously do the same. The Bracket Project's own predictions continues with the Omaha theme, this time against a nine-seed against Drake before facing KU.
The fellas over at Crashing The Dance use "statistical machine learning" (otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence) to create their bracket. CTD missed on three at-large teams last year. Really, these guys -- who haven't come up with a name for their AI machine (we suggest "Ron") -- come up with a bunch of statistical data. CTD believes Notre Dame is in, but has the Irish as a No. 11 seed on their S-Curve.
Then there is this guy named Bryce. Apparently, he does bracketologizing, too. And he likes Notre Dame, which might explain why even after the Irish showed no road backbone against Marquette and have lost two of four neutral-site games this year, he has Notre Dame as a No. 6 seed. And he has the Irish MOVING UP a line from his last week predictions. What did the Irish do in the meantime? Had a week off and got blown out. Listen, we also think Notre Dame will be an NCAA Tournament team, but right now, the Irish are not playing at the level of a No. 6 seed -- at least not away from home.
Then again, he has Indiana as a No. 8 seed, so we're not sure what to make of his guesses except to say objectivity clearly doesn't play into it.

As far as the women go, ESPN is the only one we've found that does such projections -- if you know of more, let us know -- and the sports conglomerate has Notre Dame as a No. 6 seed facing No. 11 Illinois State (Midwest Special in Cali!) before potentially facing host Stanford in the second round.

-By Michael Rothstein of The Journal Gazette