The A-10 tournament starts Wednesday. No. 3 seed Dayton (22-9) will play No. 6 Saint Josephs (20-10), No. 11 Massachusetts (12-19) or No. 14 La Salle (13-18) in the quarterfinals at 7:30 p.m. Friday.
Dayton’s at-large chances took a major hit when it lost three straight games to George Washington, Massachusetts and George Mason in January, and they still looked dead two weeks ago after a 76-72 loss at Loyola Chicago. Then the Flyers won their last four regular-season games, saving their best for last with a 79-76 victory at Virginia Commonwealth on Friday.
The bracketologists have noticed Dayton’s run of success and are starting to whisper its name again.
• Jerry Palm, of CBS Sports, listed Dayton among his “First Four Out” teams in his latest projection.
Palm has Baylor, San Diego State, Xavier and Boise State as the last four at-large teams, with Ohio State, North Carolina and Wake Forest joining Dayton in the group of teams on the wrong side of the bubble.
• Joe Lunardi, of ESPN, put Dayton in the “Next Four Out” category behind four others in the “First Four Out.”
Lunardi has Ohio State, Oklahoma, San Diego State and Xavier in the “Last Four In,” and then Boise State, North Carolina, Texas and Colorado State in the “First Four Out.” He groups Dayton with Nebraska, Wake Forest and Cincinnati in the “Next Four Out.”
• Mike DeCourcy, of Fox Sports, listed Dayton as one of the “First Four Out” along with Nebraska, Texas and North Carolina. He has Baylor, Ohio State, Indiana and Xavier as the “Last Four In.”
• One NCAA tournament expert on BracketMaxtrix.com, Sheldon Jacobson, a professor at the University of Illinois, has Dayton in the tournament as a No. 11 seed.
• ESPN’s Neil Paine listed Dayton among his teams with “Work to Do” in his latest Bubble Watch story on Sunday.
“The ESPN model thinks the Flyers have a 30% chance to make the tourney overall,” Paine wrote, “but an 18% chance conditional on failing to secure an automatic bid. Their roughly 60th-place rankings in SOR and WAB make them a fringe résumé team in the aggregate, but they also have four wins against the top 50. The A-10 has sent two teams to the tourney in three of the past four years, and the Flyers rank second in the conference in NET (with a H2H win over VCU now), so Dayton could be an interesting team to watch if it can win some conference tourney games as well.”
• JBR Bracketology lists Dayton among his “First Four Out” with North Carolina, UC Irvine and Wake Forest.
“Dayton with the HUGE jump,” he wrote. “Flyers are right there with some help this week.”
• Jim Root, of The Athletic, lists Dayton as one of seven teams in the mix for the last 16 at-large bids.
“The Flyers are still a mega-long shot,” Root wrote on Monday, “but Friday night’s win at VCU lifts them back onto the fringes of the discussion. Unfortunately, Dayton would not get another crack at VCU until the championship game; at that point, another victory would do a lot more than simply bolster the Flyers’ at-large resume. It’s tough to envision Dayton getting in just by adding wins over Saint Joseph’s in the quarterfinals and George Mason in the semifinals, but I suppose wilder things have happened.”
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