Great Midwest Men's Basketball Championship Bracket (PDF)
Official Men's Basketball Championship Page
INDIANAPOLIS – March Madness will be delivered to Croy Gymnasium, home of the regular-season champion Findlay Oilers, and site of this year’s Great Midwest Athletic Conference Men’s Basketball Championship.
Eight teams from the Great Midwest will compete Thursday, March 1, through Saturday, March 3, for the conference tournament trophy. This will be the sixth year of the conference championship tournament since the inaugural event in 2013.
The championship bracket follows the regional format with times in the quarterfinal round set for noon, 2:30 p.m., 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. ET. Semifinal contests will tip at 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. while the championship game will start at 2 p.m.
All postseason contests will be streamed through the Great Midwest Digital Network on Stretch Internet with live stats also available.
The all-conference team will consist of 20 student-athletes, including five on the first team, five on the second team and 10 additional honorable mention selections. The league’s coaches are also voting on individual awards, all of which will be unveiled Wednesday evening at the championship banquet.
The Great Midwest has had four teams placed in the Midwest Region rankings for the past two weeks with Findlay, Hillsdale, Walsh and Malone, all receiving consideration from the committee.
Each conference in the Midwest Region (Great Midwest, Great Lakes Valley Conference, Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) receives an automatic qualifier into the NCAA Championship bracket before the remaining at-large seeds are determined from the final region rankings.
Croy is a notoriously tough place to play for any opponent and the Oilers (25-3, 19-1 G-MAC) will enter this year’s tournament with a target on their back as the No. 1 seed while being nationally ranked for most of the season.
UF had the regular-season title sewn up back on Feb. 8. The Oilers will draw the Great Midwest’s only NCAA Championship qualifier in the opening round, No. 8 seed Kentucky Wesleyan (15-15, 9-11 G-MAC).
KWC has cut down the nets for two consecutive seasons with a combined 55-7 overall record, but this year will be more of a mountain to climb as one of the final seeds to clinch. UF and KWC will play at 6 p.m. on Thursday.
The early game to get the tournament going features No. 2 seed Walsh vs. No. 7 Lake Erie at noon. The favored Cavaliers (19-7, 14-6 G-MAC) have been struck by the Storm (15-13, 10-10 G-MAC) twice in regular-season meetings, not faring well at home in North Canton or in Painesville.
Of course, the cliché saying goes that beating a team three times throughout the course of the year is incredibly tough and LEC’s group, lead by head coach Kyle Conley, will try to show it’s up to the task to debunk that line of reasoning.
No. 6 seed Alderson Broaddus will go into a matchup against No. 3 regionally-ranked Hillsdale as the slight underdog, but the Battlers (18-10, 12-9 G-MAC) won their only meeting against the Chargers (19-8, 13-7 G-MAC) by double digits back on Dec. 30. Hillsdale had the top scoring team defense in the league, permitting just 65.5 points per game scored against them.
By tradition, AB has been one of the most successful programs in the conference tournament format since joining the league and have a trio of players, Brandon Willis, Malik Bocook, Mike Davis, who can keep that trend sustained.
Don’t sleep on the Thursday nightcap as the last contest with an 8:30 p.m. tip will pit red-hot No. 5 Ohio Dominican vs. No. 4 regionally-ranked Malone. The Panthers (17-10, 12-8 G-MAC) transformed from bubble team to make the conference tourney to a team that no one wants to play as winners in nine of their last 10. ODU has won three of those games in overtime fashion and beat four programs in the conference tourney bracket.
The Pioneers (19-9, 12-8 G-MAC) are trying to get back on track after closing out the regular season with back-to-back defeats on the road. Prior to that though, Malone strung together seven consecutive wins, including handing Findlay its lone loss on the conference slate.