Today, I continue to preview the early season tournaments with printable bracket links, title odds, and commentary. Click here for Part 1.

Legends Classic Printable Bracket

The Legends Classic might be the most highly anticipated early season tournament because of the potential finals matchup between Indiana and UCLA. Both highly acclaimed programs have had struggles in recent seasons, and with both teams returning to the top of the polls, this game will generate more than its normal share of interest.

Indiana should have an advantage early in the season since they can depend so heavily on last year’s starting lineup. But I would expect at least one new face to make a big impact for the Hoosiers. Whether it will be freshman Yogi Ferrell, Jeremy Hollowell, or Hanner Perea providing a key spark, or the oft-injured Maurice Creek, the joy for the Hoosiers will be seeing which new player helps take the team to a championship level.

For UCLA, adding Top-5 recruit Kyle Anderson will be a big help, but the key question will be how such a tall lineup can function effectively. Offensively, UCLA needs to worry about its spacing and figure out what to do when teams dare the Bruins to take threes. Defensively, UCLA may have to play more zone than Ben Howland has ever utilized because his players may not have the quickness to keep perimeter players in front of them. But as Georgetown showed last year, a zone with four players 6’8” or taller can be extremely effective.

CBE Classic Printable Bracket

The expectations for St. Louis are somewhat lower now that head coach Rick Majerus has left the team for health reasons. But the Billikens returning lineup still looks strong enough to win the A10, and early in the season they should be particularly dangerous. Last year ineligibility issues limited the Jayhawks, but this year’s lineup looks like what you would traditionally expect from a Bill Self team. There are the veterans with Final Four experience like Jeff Withey, Elijah Johnson, and Travis Releford who should anchor the team in difficult situations. And there is a talented group of newcomers like Perry Ellis and Ben McLemore who should provide the athleticism to compete against the elite teams. Washington St. lineup is not strong enough to hang with the Jayhawks, but look for Kansas transfer Royce Woolridge to try to have a big game against his former team.

Maui Invitational Printable Bracket

I think that there is a misconception that teams are only exciting to watch if they have Final Four expectations. North Carolina may be in rebuilding mode, but in my eyes that actually makes them more fascinating to follow this year. Freshman Marcus Paige will likely take over at the point-guard slot, and given Roy Williams track record as a coach who lets his elite freshmen recruits play, the team may live or die by how ready Paige is to pilot the Tar Heels fast-break offense. But North Carolina doesn’t have to depend on Paige to win this year. Dexter Strickland has some experience as a point-guard from last season and I would expect him to play major minutes at point-guard as well. But the real key is that North Carolina doesn’t have to run-and-gun to win this year. All the returning talent at the 2-guard spot should mean that North Carolina has the profile of a team that will be lethal in the half-court. If they choose to go four-guards around James McAdoo, they could attempt to replicate what Missouri did last year, and be plenty effective.

More realistically, Roy Williams will try to develop a few more post players alongside McAdoo. And Tar Heels fans may have to wait patiently as freshmen forwards Brice Johnson and Joel James make their share of mistakes early in the season. But it is all part of the broader North Carolina strategy. While Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke teams are usually in top shape in November and prepared to dominate from the start of the season, Roy Williams runs his lineup to be peaking in March. And all the mistakes Paige, Johnson, and James make in November should be worth it late in the season.

As usual, Texas has high expectations because of its talent including seven players who were top 100 recruits coming out of high school. This year the hype is focused on freshman forward Cameron Ridley. But for a team that will be relying entirely on freshmen and sophomores, Texas is surprisingly experienced. Myck Kabongo, Sheldon McClellan, Jonathan Holmes, and Julien Lewis all played major minutes last year and should be poised for breakout seasons. Their experience could very well carry Texas to the Maui title.

Marquette also has a number of quality pieces if only Buzz Williams can find a way to put them all together. How will he best utilize a roster of offensive specialists (like Davante Gardner) and defensive specialists (like Chris Otule) will determine how far the Golden Eagles can fly. But Buzz Williams has proven he can fill in for major losses year after year, and I would expect nothing less this season.

On paper, Marquette’s season outlook isn’t much worse than that of North Carolina or Texas. But this tournament ‘s title odds aren’t based on team quality as much as they are based on match-ups. Texas gets the favorable draw on the south side of the bracket with non-D1 Chaminade and offensively challenged USC or Illinois in the semis. Meanwhile North Carolina gets a favorable first round match-up with a decimated Mississippi St. roster but will face a tough semi-final matchup. On the other hand, Marquette gets the worst of all worlds, likely needing to beat a much improved Butler team to even get a crack at the semis.

Cancun Challenge Printable Bracket

Iowa and DePaul are both slowly improving, but not at a rate that would perk any national interest.

Great Alaska Shootout Printable Bracket

The two most intriguing teams are teams that are switching conferences this year. Oral Roberts is joining the Southland conference where they will immediately be the favorite. And Belmont has dominated the ASun prompting the move to the OVC this year. Look for those two teams to meet in the final.

Battle 4 Atlantis Printable Bracket

Last year’s Maui invitational may have had more big names. But the 2012 Battle 4 Atlantis tournament may very well be the strongest early season tournament that we have seen in a long time. It would not be a surprise for all 8 of these teams to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the year.

I have already explained why Duke should expect a bounce-back season. And while Louisville might have the best defensive team in the nation, the team has enough questions on offense to keep Rick Pitino up at night. I have already written about Missouri’s talented transfer class. And Josh Pastner is becoming a better coach as his roster of talented players matures into upperclassman.

But the real story here is the first round underdogs that could still make a deep run. Minnesota brings back all its key players from last year’s NIT runner-up team and adds Trevor Mbakwe back into the mix. Mbakwe was arguably Minnesota’s best player prior to his injury, and so his return is huge for the Gophers. Former Blue Devil assistant Johnny Dawkins is sadly on the opposite side of the bracket as Duke. But behind superstar sophomore Chasson Randle, Stanford might just be able to steal a couple of wins to give Dawkins a shot at his mentor.

Northern Iowa head coach Ben Jacobson took a veteran team to the NCAA tournament and upset Kansas three years ago, and he has a veteran team again this year. With all but one key rotation player returning, this looks like the year Northern Iowa makes some noise again. Finally, leading scorer Bradford Burgess is gone which will mean VCU will be searching for a new identity early in the year. But you can never count Shaka Smart out in a tournament setting.

Old Spice Classic Printable Bracket

This is another tournament where the mid-major squads should dominate. I can’t quite decide which under-the-radar player nationally I am more excited to see, Gary Bell Jr. of Gonzaga or Jake Cohen of Davidson. All Bell did last season was make 48% of his threes as a freshmen. And he almost single-handedly kept Gonzaga in its NCAA tournament game against Ohio St. last year. On the other hand, on a points per minute basis, few players are as productive as Davidson senior Jake Cohen. Cohen has never averaged worse than 12 PPG, despite never playing more than 62% of his team’s minutes. But when the season was on the line last year, he came up the biggest. Louisville’s defense was extremely stingy last season but all Cohen did was score 24 points against Louisville in the first round of the tournament.

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The older I get, the more I see that one of the things I love most about sports is the variety of it, the diversity of it and the CHARACTERS. Men’s tennis is at its best in many years because, for the first time in a long time, the top three or four players all have wildly different styles. The Tim Tebow story was fun on so many levels, but one of those levels was that he was just SO DIFFERENT in how he played — I’d say we are entering a great time for quarterbacks, because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Eli Manning and Drew Brees and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and Tebow and others are not really alike at all.

-- Joe Posnanski

As a basketball fan, I’ve never understood the division that exists between fans of the NBA and the NCAA. While the NBA has the best basketball players in the world, March Madness is compelling in its own right and as entertaining as anything that happens on the professional level.

In the NBA, the owners of the 30 franchises consider turning a profit and getting an equal shot at the top players a right, regardless of how well (or how poorly) they run their organization and the respective size of their fan-bases. Since every losing team is a few ping pong balls from the rights to a LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Dwight Howard, personnel determines scheme in the NBA.

In contrast, the vast majority of the 344 Division I programs in college basketball have little chance of ever receiving a commitment from a McDonald’s All-American. But instead of petulantly trying to sabotage the sport in a misguided effort to legislate fairness, schools try many creative ways of leveraging the talents of the players they can recruit. As a result, scheme determines personnel in the NCAA.

At Syracuse, Jim Boeheim has made a Hall of Fame career out of running a contrarian scheme, in his case an aggressive 2-3 zone. The Orange traditionally have rosters full of “1.5’s”, 6’3+ combo guards lacking the quickness to defend elite PG’s and the size to defend SG’s, and “3.5’s”, 6’8+ combo forwards lacking the quickness to defend elite SF’s and the size to defend PF’s. However, because Syracuse never plays man defense, the athletic deficiencies of their players are minimized.

So while nearly every NBA team runs a fairly similar system of isolations, pick-and-rolls and man defense, an incredibly diverse array of styles can be found in the college game. On one end of the spectrum, teams like Missouri play four guards and pressure the ball 94 feet for 48 minutes, on the other, teams like Wisconsin run a deliberate motion offense, trying to minimize the number of possessions and shoot at the very end of the shot-clock.

In the NBA, the players are too good for the “40 Minutes of Hell” system (which Mike Anderson has brought to Missouri and Arkansas in the last few years) to be successful. Like Mike Leach’s bizarre pass-happy offense in college football, Anderson’s system, which he learned as a member of Nolan Richardson’s staff in Arkansas in the 1990’s, has philosophical holes that professional athletes can exploit. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining on the collegiate level.

And with 68 teams set to compete in the NCAA Tournament, there are a lot more surprises in the college game. Even programs ranked in the top-15 like Murray State have barely been on national TV this season.

We have a pretty good idea of how teams like the Pacers and the 76ers match up with the top of the Eastern Conference but not whether an undersized Murray State squad can handle the size of an elite team from a Power Six conference. It’s an open question how Isaiah Canaan’s speed and athleticism translates outside of the Ohio Valley Conference. Non-conference play in college basketball generally ends in late December, so it’s almost impossible to gauge how younger teams like Texas, Washington and Tennessee who have found their groove in the last two months will fare in March.

In the NBA, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City aren’t three of the final four teams left in the playoffs. In the NCAA, as many as two dozen teams have a legitimate shot at making a run at the Final Four.

Of course, in terms of entertainment, none of this makes the NCAA necessarily better or worse than the NBA, just different. But, as Posnanski writes, there’s something to be said for the concept of “different” in the modern sports world. Basketball fans of all stripes should enjoy March Madness; the NBA will still be here in a few weeks.

It does not take much statistical analysis to realize that Vanderbilt returns the “right” players.  Losing Andre Walker and some non-rotation seniors is not a concern. But for teams that return less than 90% of their previous lineup, it is interesting to ask whether the team returns the “right” or the “wrong” players. On Monday, I defined the term Relative Value and I showed the teams that returned the least efficient or the “wrong” players. Today, I show teams that return the most efficient or the “right” players.

Editorial Note:  I had written this about Missouri: “Missouri loses a freshman, Ricky Kreklow, who never really fit in, and a senior, Justin Safford, who peaked two years ago, and saw his ORtg fall to 96.6 as a senior. Laurence Bowers and Ricardo Ratliffe were better post players than Safford last season, and this is definitely a case of a team returning the right players for the offense.” But Bowers tore his ACL this week, and now Missouri has some serious questions in the middle.  You can lower them significantly in the above list. But even if the statement is no longer accurate about Missouri, several other teams still return the right players this year:

Gonzaga loses Demtri Goodsen, but returns players like Robert Sacre and Elias Harris who were extremely efficient last season. Given Goodsen’s struggles with turnovers, the team should be able to overcome his departure.

Oral Roberts loses three inefficient players from the back of the rotation, but with the five most efficient players returning, Oral Roberts looks like one of the nation’s top small conference teams.

Of course ORtg is not the only factor that matters. On paper, the loss of Chris Wright (93.0 ORtg) and Juwan Staten (90.3 ORtg) is a clear improvement for a Dayton offense that returns a number of efficient players and is led by Chris Johnson. But Wright’s low ORtg was at least partly a function of the fact that he had become such a high usage player. With Dayton’s offense built around getting Wright the ball, his loss is not an automatic improvement for the Flyers. Relative Value is a useful concept, but it certainly is not the only factor to consider.

Last year’s CAA Standings

Another team high on the Relative Value list is Drexel. After a rough couple of years, Bruiser Flint turned Drexel into a winner last season, and the vast majority of the key players are back. The team loses Gerald Colds from the rotation, but the truth is that Colds will not really be missed. Colds was not a great passer, and not a great three point shooter, and subtracting his 88.5 ORtg seems like a clear improvement for an otherwise strong offense.

There is reason to think Drexel is the CAA favorite, but there is no guarantee that Drexel will finish ahead of the traditional favorites (VCU, George Mason, and Old Dominion). Because of the unbalanced schedule, and strength throughout the league, often the best team does not finish in first in the CAA. VCU won five NCAA tournament games, but finished 4^th in the CAA last season.

One team I expect to drop back is Hofstra. Hofstra was very fortunate to finish in 3^rd place last season. Their margin-of-victory numbers suggested they were closer to the 6^th best team in the league. But PG Charles Jenkins was an all-around stat-sheet stuffer, and he willed his team to victory in close games. Without Jenkins, Hofstra should take a significant step back.

Not only was Towson winless in league play last year, but things got even worse this off-season when star sophomore Isaiah Philmore transferred to Xavier. It may be hard to duplicate a 4-win season, but with Philmore and senior Josh Brown leaving, Towson has almost no chance of avoiding the CAA cellar once again.

Last year’s SEC Standings

Vanderbilt returns so many players that expectations should be high. But last year’s rotation finished 88^th in the nation in defense, and I have a hard time believing that the same group of players will be dramatically better. And without a significant improvement on that end of the court, Vanderbilt will have a tough time living up to its lofty expectations. The good news for Vanderbilt is that defensive performances are fairly unpredictable. Not only are our measures of defense rather poor (blocks, steals and defensive rebounds do not tell the whole story), but team defense can jump up or down between seasons with no clear explanation. Still, I fear Vanderbilt will have what I like to call a “Mike Brey” type season, where they pick up some big wins, but their defensive holes cause them to lose in the first round of the NCAA tournament. John Jenkins, Festus Ezeli, and Jeffry Taylor are a joy to watch, and I hope they prove me wrong.

I am much more bullish on Alabama. For the last few year’s Anthony Grant has gotten by with tenacious defense, but inadequate offense.  But as noted above, Alabama returns the “right” players this year. Alabama loses Chris Hines and Senario Hillman, two players with sub-95 ORtgs last year. Meanwhile, the returning group includes Tony Mitchell, JaMychal Green, and Trevor Releford who were all efficient offensive players last year. The days of watching Alabama struggle to score may finally be coming to an end.

As for the rest of the SEC, I am looking forward to several random events: 

I want to see John Calipari groom Anthony Davis from an athletic shot-blocking freshman, into a polished All-American.

I want to see how many times the bottom of the SEC loses to “cupcakes” this season.  I honestly think this league has upgraded its coaching, but there are still a lot of decimated rosters at the back of the standings.

I want to see how Billy Donovan handles former McDonald’s All-American Mike Rosario’s ego when he finds himself sitting on the bench behind Bradley Beal, Erving Walker, and Kenny Boynton in crunch time.  (And if Beal is on the bench in crunch time, I will be screaming at my TV.)

I want to see Mike Anderson take a team full of bench players and freshmen and surprise us once again by playing competitive basketball.

And finally, I want to see how long it takes Mississippi St. to find another bad headline. Last year, it was the suspensions and in-team fighting. This summer, Renardo Sidney did not accompany his team on its international tour. And this fall, it was prized recruit DJ Gardner who was kicked off the team in part because of inappropriate tweets. With this team, a quiet month is a good month.