Bracket Junkie: We’re not worthy

There are a couple interesting stories in this bracket that I want to detail before we get to the traditional portions of this Bracket Junkie breakdown. The first is the strange journey of Arizona State. Picked almost unanimously to finish ninth in a deep Pac-10, the Sun Devils instead jumped out to a 4-0 start in conference play including wins over Oregon, Arizona and at Cal. But Herb Sendek’s team still had some growing pains to work through and immediately lost five straight games. Three of those were on the road and four of them were against teams that are in this week’s field, but a 4-5 record with a trip to Tucscon on the horizon seemed to indicate the end to ASU’s surprising season.

Arizona State went from being 10 spots from the field two weeks ago to 16 spots from the field last week and now into the field today. Since the five game losing streak, ASU went to Arizona and finished off the season sweep and then hosted red-hot Stanford and beat the Cardinal in overtime. ASU has gone from the 16th out to putting 13 teams between it and the bubble, a turnover of about 30 positions that has the Devils as the last No. 8 seed. It’s amazing to think that no team in America has more than Arizona State’s four wins against the RPI top 150.

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