Jay Bilas explains choosing Arizona as his national champion pick

ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas filled out his March Madness bracket on Selection Sunday and boldly predicted No. 2 Arizona would end the season as national champions. The Wildcats (32-2), who haven’t lost in more than a month, made the field as the NCAA Tournament’s second overall seed and the No. 1 seed in the West bracket.

Bilas defended his Arizona pick during a Tuesday appearance on The Rich Eisen Show on ESPN, revealing his prediction came down to the Wildcats’ checking off a lot of boxes. That included dominating what Bilas believes was the best conference in college basketball this season.

“They’re unbelievably talented and they’re big. They won their conference tournament, they won their conference by a couple of games in the Big 12, which I thought was the best conference in the country,” Bilas told Eisen on Tuesday. “They’re not a prolific three-point shooting team, and it’s not that they can’t shoot; they choose not to. They want to play inside-out.

“… But it’s more, Arizona has been among the most consistent teams (this season). They only lost two games, back-to-back at Kansas and Texas Tech, at full strength when Arizona wasn’t full strength,” Bilas concluded. “And consistency doesn’t necessarily help you in the tournament, but they were the most consistent team – them and Duke – throughout the course of the regular season, and I think that matters.”

Bilas did acknowledge Arizona’s one potential red flag is the relative youth of its starting lineup, with three freshmen — guard Brayden Burries and forwards Koa Peat and Ivan Kharchenkov — representing three of the team’s five leading scorers. Burries and Peat currently rank first and second on the Wildcats’ scoring list, averaging 15.9 and 13.6 points per game, while Kharchenkov averages 10.1 points per game.

As part of ESPN’s College GameDay post-bracket reveal show Sunday night, Bilas laid out how he expects this year’s NCAA Tournament to ultimately play out. While he expects No. 1 seed Arizona to win it all, Bilas doesn’t expect this year’s Final Four field to be all chalk.

In fact, Bilas projected No. 3 seed Michigan State will knock off top-overall seed Duke in the Elite Eight to win the East bracket before upending defending national champion Florida in the Final Four. Bilas also expected No. 2 seed Iowa State to get the best of No. 1 seed Michigan to win the Midwest bracket before falling to the Wildcats in the Final Four.

“As we get toward the Final Four, I’ve got Michigan State and Florida, a rematch of the 2000 national championship game. And Arizona and Iowa State, who just played in the Big 12 championship, one of the great games we’ve seen all year,” Bilas said Sunday night. “And Michigan State and Arizona, neither have won a national championship — it’s ’97 for the West coast, Arizona, and 2000 for Michigan State. That’s a drought. I’m going for Arizona, ending the drought out west.”