Candidates for Glass Slipper Ready to March

A little less than six weeks from now, you might be staring at a bracket thinking, “I’ll take Manhattan.”

“Kent State ... Is that shooter still there?”

“Can Creighton really be Cinderella if it’s already in the top 25?”

Face it, you might do better picking NCAA tournament games if you took every favorite all the way through to the title game.

But the fun is in the underdogs, so here’s a look at some of the teams you might want to follow down the stretch if you’re searching for a March sweetheart.

ESPN has tried to get in on the act by scheduling its “Bracket Buster Saturday” for Feb. 22, a slate of nine games ostensibly intended as a showcase for so-called mid-major teams trying to impress the NCAA selection committee.

Unfortunately, those might end up being elimination games for teams that later fail to win their conference tournaments. After all, when ESPN creates a Gonzaga-Tulsa game, a Creighton-Fresno State game, a Kent State-Hawaii game and a Wisconsin Milwaukee-Southern Illinois game, it also creates four losers.

The difficulty of picking the upstarts of March before the season begins is illustrated by ESPN’s selections: Half of the other 10 teams have losing records. Four of those five games -- which include such disappointments as 2002 NCAA teams Western Kentucky (14-8) and UC Santa Barbara (9-10) -- are slated for ESPNPlus instead of ESPN or ESPN2.

Here’s a look at some teams that could make noise in March, with current RPI estimates from Jerry Palm’s collegerpi.com.

Butler (17-3, No. 54 RPI) -- After last season’s selection committee snub, this is the team most likely to be fired up for its conference tournament.

Not that there weren’t exacerbating circumstances when 25-5 Butler was left out after being upset by Wisconsin Green Bay by one point in the first round of the Horizon League tournament despite winning the regular-season title with a 12-4 record. (The mother of guard Rob Walls died the night before the conference tournament game, leaving some players distraught and sleep-deprived.)

The Bulldogs ended up in the National Invitation Tournament.

This team doesn’t have the marquee victories over Purdue and Indiana that last season’s team did -- only a 20-point loss at Duke to show for its attempt to go head-to-head with the big boys.

Creighton (20-2, No. 41 RPI) -- The Bluejays have been a fixture in the top 25 this season but still qualify as outsiders -- and bona-fide NCAA noise-makers after a double-overtime upset of Florida in the first round last year.

Creighton shouldn’t be written off as a one-man team, but sharp-shooting forward Kyle Korer has played his way into national player-of-the-year contention. Although he’s not likely to win the award, his 50% three-point shooting can win NCAA tournament games. (He has made as many as nine threes in a game.)

Notable kudos: Notre Dame Coach Mike Brey called Creighton “this year’s Kent State” after the Bluejays beat the Irish (Kent State reached the Elite Eight last season before losing to Indiana).

Dayton (16-3, No. 22 RPI) -- With victories over Cincinnati, Villanova and Marquette and a respectable loss at Duke, the Flyers are working on a resume that could get them into the NCAA tournament even as an at-large team.

Bonus points: The Atlantic 10 tournament will be played on Dayton’s home court.

More bonus points: The Flyers are experienced and balanced, with three players -- Brooks Hall, Ramod Marshall and Keith Waleskowski -- selected Atlantic 10 players of the week.

Gonzaga (17-5, No. 39 RPI) -- Gonzaga has gone from underdog to big dog back to underdog again. But don’t dismiss the Bulldogs, who have hit their stride lately after some early shakiness. (Those losses to Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, Stanford and St. Joseph’s are forgivable. They all figure to be NCAA teams.)

Blake Stepp can’t completely replace Dan Dickau, but he’s playing very well, averaging 17 points and six assists, and fast-emerging forward Ronny Turiaf has added a new dimension of athleticism. Come March -- it would be best to win that West Coast Conference tournament, of course -- Gonzaga should be back in a role more comfortable than last year’s unsuccessful turn as a favorite.

Kent State (16-2, No. 30 RPI) That shooter -- Trevor Huffman -- is gone and Stan Heath has taken over for Nolan Richardson at Arkansas. But after falling a victory shy of the Final Four last year, Kent State still has rugged forward Antonio Gates. And the Golden Flashes can still shoot: Kent State was second in the nation in field-goal percentage this week at 51.5%, trailing only Creighton, and ranked No. 1 in three-point percentage at 43.9%.

There are no particularly distinguished victories. The losses are at St. Bonaventure, a notoriously difficult place to play, and to Bowling Green in a game Kent State lost after leading by 20 at halftime.

Manhattan (17-3, No. 62 RPI) -- Guard Luis Flores is the sort of little-known player who could become a March star. He scored 44 points against Fairfield, 38 against Niagara, 35 against Canisius and 30 against Hofstra and has been held to fewer than 20 only five times this season.

Manhattan’s marquee victory is a 72-65 win over St. John’s at Madison Square Garden. But with an RPI in the 60s, Manhattan needs to win the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament to make the NCAA tournament.

If the Jaspers manage that -- and avoid the play-in game -- they’ll be looking to pull off an upset along the lines of former coach Fran Fraschilla’s 1995 team, which eliminated fourth-seeded Oklahoma in the first round.

Pennsylvania (10-5, No. 87 RPI) -- This is based almost entirely on one result: Penn’s eye-popping 99-61 victory over USC, a game in which the Quakers shot 72% and made 15 of 20 three-point shots. Other victories include Villanova and Temple with losses to Drexel, Delaware, Providence, Colorado and St. Joseph’s.

Penn will have to win the Ivy League’s regular-season title as expected to make the NCAA tournament -- there is no Ivy tournament and an at-large bid is out of the question. But if Penn shoots as it did against USC again, any team in the NCAA tournament would be quaking.

St. Joseph’s (16-3, No. 28 RPI) -- The Hawks were one of the disappointments of last season, but they’re making up for it now. They defeated Villanova by 17 points this week, and should have gotten more attention in December for winning at Gonzaga -- an overtime victory that ended Gonzaga’s home winning streak at 29 games.

Point guard Jameer Nelson’s scoring might catch your attention -- he has two 30-point games -- but it’s the team defense that will make the Hawks tournament tough.

St. Joseph’s has held one team in the 30s -- Drexel managed only 37 points -- and has kept five in the 40s and seven in the 50s. Only three teams have reached the 70s against the Hawks, who ranked second in the nation this week in scoring defense at 57.1 points a game, and first in defensive field-goal percentage at 36.1%.

Southern Illinois (14-4, No. 65 RPI) -- Creighton has some competition in the Missouri Valley Conference. Southern Illinois, remember, reached the Sweet 16 last season after upsetting Texas Tech and Georgia. Center Rolan Roberts is gone from that team but guard Kent Williams is still around, and the Salukis played Illinois to a two-point game in December. Other losses were to Charlotte, St. Louis and Creighton, 85-76.