1. Senior laden team with very good chemistry
2. As much parity in college basketball as I can ever remember (on a given day, it's not a stretch to say that BYU can beat any team in the country)
3. BYU has already played comptetively against teams that are as good as anyone they'll see in the tournament, often without Yoeli (so they shouldn't go into "deer in the headlights" mode against a quality opponent)
4. Nixon returns and plays at or near his pre-injury level and Baxter continues to shake off the rust

And reasons to temper those hopes:
1. While BYU is a very offensively efficient team, they still somewhat live and die by the 3 ball and if they go cold against a quality opponent, it's season over
2. BYU, while better defensively than I expected them to be, still has a lot of defensive weaknesses that quality teams should be able to consistently exploit
3. While BYU's coaching staff has exceeded expectations, they have relatively little collective NCAA tournament coaching experience
4. Neither Nixon nor Baxter are able to contribute as much as BYU will need to make a deep tournament run