Just one more ticket punched today, but rest assured no high major team will want to see Missouri Valley champion Northern Iowa in their first game. Here’s your brief introduction as now five invitees have accepted the NCAA’s bids.

#5 – Northern Iowa (23-10, 14-4 MVC). UNI won the regular season championship and took care of business this weekend at Arch Madness, winning tight ones over Indiana St. and Illinois St. (in OT) to get the automatic bid.  In today’s game, we kept expecting Illinois St. to put UNI away behind the shooting of Osiris Eldridge and Champ Oguchi; but UNI stayed poised and made the correct plays down the stretch to secure the third win over ISU this season.

Projected Seed: #12

Something to Remember: UNI likes to slow the pace down to a crawl.  They don’t turn the ball over, they hit their FTs (75%) and they don’t make many mistakes.  Look for a possible upset if they play an undisciplined team that gets frustrated with ball-control teams.

Stay tuned – four more tickets will be punched tomorrow – CAA, MAAC, SoCon, WCC.  RTC Live will be reporting live from the WCC Finals.

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 10:16 pm by rtmsf and is filed under 2009 ncaa tournament. Tagged: automatic bids, missouri valley, ncaa tournament, northern iowa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.