West Warriors Secure Playoff Edge, Charge Toward Title!

There’s Wilbur, suspiciously without Wilma…….. | Jacob Snow-USA TODAY Sports Sick of hard-hitting analysis of the 2026 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament? Up to your eyeballs in expert picks chock-full of astute takes on players to watch and budding upsets?

Fear not, friends: your pals at Anonymous Eagle are here to inject some half-baked, homespun “insight” into the proceedings, with our (mostly) annual region-by-region tour, as we go Anonymously Through the Brackets. For each region, we’ll give you our patented Anonymous Eagle Half-Arsed Analysis with: a gutless pick to win the region; a sleeper regional champ; a CRUSH YOUR MAN upset special; a player/team we’d pay to watch; a player most likely to carry his team singlehandedly to the Sweet 16; and the best player in the region that you’ve never heard of before. Let’s move around to the West Region, which is kind of funny, because on the NCAA’s website, the West Region is in the “northeast” corner of the page, if it were a map…..

anyway…. GUTLESS WONDER Pick To Win The Region The #1 team in the AP poll for nine straight weeks this season is absolutely a cheap way out of picking this region, especially since they’ve been in the top five for every in-season poll. That alone would be a good enough reason to go with Arizona as the favorite in the West.

However, by definition, the Gutless Wonder pick has to be either the #1 or the #2 seed in a region, and picking Arizona is even the coward’s way out of that decision. Purdue is the #2 seed here, and they came into the Big Ten tournament with losses in four of their last six games to wrap up a run of just 6-7 in their last 13. Then they won the Big Ten tournament.