MEMPHIS – Less than three weeks before Selection Sunday and the Memphis Tigers seem in pretty good shape to make a second straight NCAA Tournament.

According to Bracketmatrix.com, a site that averages out some 92 online brackets around the country to get a consensus on the Field of 68, 90 of those 92 brackets have the Tigers in the field.  In as high as a six seed and as low as an 11 but in on 98-percent of the brackets.

The Tigers went toe to toe Sunday with a Houston team that just moved up to number one in the country, despite playing without the conference’s best player in Kendric Davis and with Alex Lomax and Malcolm Dandridge returning from long layoffs.

While some people might still have questions about this Tiger team, Penny Hardaway does not.

He knows his team belongs back in the Big Dance.

“I feel good. I feel like we’ve done a lot to show who we are. If they were watching the game today, they saw we had no Kedric Davis and outscored the number one team in the country in the second half,” Hardaway said.  “I’m not trying to put up a campaign out there. I’m just, I hope they don’t judge us from, oh they lost to Houston and now we got to drop them so many spots.  We really didn’t have Malcolm today. I don’t know if he played like 5 minutes. No Kendrick and then, even though Alo played, he’s at 90% and how they played with their full team. So to me, I feel like our hopes are good.”

The most important thing now, well, that’s two fold.

First, win the games you’re supposed to win and that starts with Wichita State on Thursday.  The Tigers cannot afford to stumble.

They also need to get Kendrick Davis back and healthy.

Hardaway hopeful Davis plays sometime this week.  Either against the Shockers or Sunday, at home against Cincinnati.