With just sixteen teams left in the tournament, here are the standings after Round 2:
1. Zucker: 418 pts. 12 players left
2. Gannon: 416 pts. 8 players left
3. Tonsmeire: 396 pts. 11 players left
4. Lampazzi: 393 pts. 8 players left.
5. Knight: 332 pts. 12 players left.
With just 25 pts separating the top 4 positions, it’s clearly still anyone’s championship to win and even Knight can’t be ruled out as he has 12 players left.
Let’s get a sense for what will happen to each team in the S16:
Zucker: He has the most intra squad matchups in the round with 5 of the 8 S16 games pitting Team Zucker against itself. After the cannibalization, the best case is that he begins the E8 with 7 players but he’s guaranteed to have a minimum of 5 which is pretty good.
Gannon: He has no player matchups in the S16 so he could conceivably get all 8 players thru the round.
Tonsmeire: He only has player matchups in Duke/Hou for which he has both Mortimer and Randolph going against just 1 cougar. So his best case is getting 10 of the 11 thru.
Lampazzi: He also only has one matchup with his own players (2 Uconn vs 1 SDSU). Best case he gets 7 players thru the round but loses firepower for sure with the guarantee game.
Knight: Has just one cannibal game with Duke/Hou and so best case could get 11 players thru to the E8.
There’s a bunch of combinations of outcomes based on the matchups in the S16, so we will have to wait at least one more round before we start to see any separation within the field.