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An undefeated Wichita State will be a No. 1 seed

marshall

With Wichita State inching ever closer to finishing the regular season without a loss on their resume, there is quite a bit of talk around the country about where this team will be seeded should they make it to Selection Sunday with a zero on the right side of their record.

It’s simple, really.

They should be a No. 1 seed.

And they will be a No. 1 seed.

Arguing otherwise is pointless.

I’ll spell it out for you like this: Wichita State will be undefeated a year removed from making the Final Four. You can show me whatever formula you want. You can run KenPom numbers and strength of schedules and RPIs and whatever you want by me, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, the people that will be making the decision about where to seed the Shockers will be actual people. It won’t be computers. It won’t be robots. It will be actual people.

People that watched the Shockers beat Pitt, Gonzaga, La Salle and Ohio State en route to the 2013 Final Four, where a couple of Tim Henderson threes cost them a shot at Michigan and a National Title.

People that no doubt do their research during the season and have seen Gregg Marshall’s media campaigning. They know that Wichita State did everything they could to put together a stronger schedule, and they know that at Saint Louis, at Alabama and Tennessee were the best they can get. They know that Marshall believes that his team was blacklisted from the season kickoff event in Dallas because they were too good for the power conference teams to play. They know that the Holiday Tournament Wichita State took part in resulted in wins over DePaul and BYU.

Now, we can argue about just how good the Shockers are and just how far they can make it in the tournament, if you’d like. Their back court is much, much better than a season ago, which probably makes them better overall. But they haven’t found a source of low-post scoring to replace Carl Hall, and that could cause some problems against someone with a vaunted perimeter defense.

Can this group make the Final Four? Absolutely. Can they win a National Title? Yes. Will they? Like every other team in the country, that depends on the matchups they luck into.

But if -- and, frankly, that’s still a relatively large if at this point -- Wichita State heads into Selection Sunday undefeated, they will be a No. 1 seed.

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