Even when we expect the unexpected, the NCAA tournament leaves us speechless.
There are three things you can count on in life: death, taxes, and Madness. And thanks to the latter, there’s never a dull tax season. March Madness truly is an amazing phenomenon. Despite a rich history of stunning upsets, amazing moments, and unlikely heroes, what happens each year always feels as unprecedented and unbelievable as ever. The 2018 NCAA tournament has been no exception.
While the tournament is a reliably unreliable sequence of events, it’s far less common to have the same kind of parody in the preceding regular season. From November through February, there are usually a handful of powerhouse teams competing for the top, a sling of squads going blow-for-blow in the middle of the pack, and an inconsistent tier of teams clawing to their way to the bottom of the brackets. But during the 2017-2018 regular season, a team could wake up in tier 2, fall asleep in tier 1, and then wake up in tier 3.
This season we witnessed more unranked schools beating top five teams than any other year in the history of college basketball. There wasn’t just an imbalance at the very top. While we had teams who started the season in the top ten slide out of the polls entirely (see USC Trojans, Louisville Cardinals), we also had unranked teams climb all the way to the top (see Virginia Cavaliers, Michigan Wolverines). Since the polls first became a thing in 1948, there has never been a season where so many ranked teams have lost to unranked opponents.
Beware the Ides of March.
A week ago it was a lukewarm take to say that we’d be in for something crazy. But no one could have predicted it being this crazy. How crazy, you ask? Entering Friday night, 16-seeds were 0-135 against against 1-seeds. They are now 1-135, thanks to UMBC’s 20-point massacre over top overall seed Virginia.
Wait, who?
The madness didn’t stop there. 6 of the 11 most popular picks to win it all didn’t even survive the first weekend. In fact, 9 of the top 16 teams have already been eliminated. For only the fourth time in the history of the tournament, at least two 1-seeds failed to reach the Sweet Sixteen. There are now as many 1-seeds remaining as there are 11-seeds, and there are more teams remaining seeded fifth or worse than teams seeded fourth or better.
Wait, what?
The dust having settled, we’re left with one helluva head-scratcher for a bracket. The South region encapsulates this tournament’s madness, as for the first time since seeding began in 1979, none of its top four seeds advanced beyond the opening weekend. The same region that Kentucky coach John Calipari had complained about being too hard now presents the easiest path for his Wildcats to reach the Final Four. Of the 17.3 million brackets submitted to ESPN this year, only .03% got the South Region of Kentucky, Kansas State, Loyola-Chicago, and Nevada right (yours truly correctly predicted the latter two). A whopping 33% of the first weekend’s games resulted in upsets. Half of the teams seeding 1-3 were eliminated.
Wait, how?
For a bit of wisdom on the matter I’ll hand the mic over to Tony Bennett, coach of the former-frontrunning Virginia Cavaliers. “If you play this game and you step into the area, this stuff can happen,” Bennett concluded. “All those who compete take that on.” Anything can happen is not a cliché for this tournament – it’s a guiding principal. Bennett’s team had a fantastic season leading up to Friday night’s meltdown, boasting a record of 31-2 in a conference that sent more teams to the tournament than any other. They were a historic defensive juggernaut, allowing less than 53 points per game. University of Maryland Baltimore County, a squad that won four games as recently as three seasons ago and squeaked into this year’s tournament as one of the lowest rated 16-seeds in recent history, put up 53 points against Virginia in the second half alone and blew out the Cavaliers by 20, the same number of points that Virginia was favored by. Absolutely insane.
Statistically speaking, that wasn’t even the craziest result of the weekend! That crown belongs to Nevada, who trailed by 22 points with 11:37 remaining and had at that point in time less than a 1% chance of victory. And then the unthinkable happened, as the Wolfpack finished the game on a 32-8 run capped off by a game winner in the final seconds, the largest 2nd-half comeback in tournament history. The win-probability chart of this game was so nuts it became the best meme of the tournament.
Year in and year out, March Madness brings us a story arc unmatched by anyone not named George R. R. Martin. Parallel to Game of Thrones, March Madness features a tangled web of established characters who could get killed off at any moment. No one is safe, regardless of power or perceived potential.
Take Roy Williams, aka Robert Baratheon, the reigning king of the NCAA tournament whose Tar Heels were pursuing a third consecutive finals appearance. North Carolina entered Sunday with the Seven Kingdoms firmly in their grasp, winners of 12 of their last 13 NCAA tournament games with an experienced army of returning players. Despite the many accolades, UNC got trounced by Texas A&M by 21 points, the largest margin of defeat in Roy Williams’ 102 tournament games and the largest margin of defeat for a reigning champ in two decades. It was death-by-boar, as the Tar Heels were dominated on the inside thanks to the forceful front-court duo of Robert Williams and Tyler Davis.
The reign of Sean Miller, aka Geoffroy Baratheon, was even shorter lived. His talent-laden Arizona Wildcats were a trendy national champion in this year’s tournament, led by future #1 draft pick DeAndre “The Mountain” Ayton. But they didn’t even make it past Friday night as they were bested by a 13-seed in yet another 20+ point blow-out. If you picked these guys to go far, you were drinking kool-aid from the wrong cup…
I know, these de-thronings can be so brutal to watch! Which brings us to our next contestant, Tom”Stannis Baratheon” Izzo. Akin to Stannis’ ever-stoic will to rule, Tom Izzo and the Michigan State Spartans are always a force to be reckoned with in March. This year’s squad was no exception, oozing with talent and experience from top to bottom. Feature-player Miles Bridges boasted a broad skillset that included an uncanny Melisandre-esque power to bring any offensive possession back from the dead. And yet when they needed him most in the waning minutes against Syracuse, Bridges powers’ were nowhere to be found and the Spartans fell to the 11th-seeded Orange. That’s what you get when you underestimate Jim “Arya Stark” Beheim, an experienced tournament assassin.
Amidst all the bloodshed, who now remains a contender for the Iron Throne? John “Cersei” Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats are a good army to bet on. His one-and-done approach may not be the most well-liked among the Seven Kingdoms, but it’s usually the most effective and his young team is peaking at the right time. You certainly can’t rule out Coach K and his fire-breathing Duke Blue Devils, whose entire starting five is destined for the NBA and has been obliterating their tournament competition like Daenerys obliterated the Lannister army during the loot train battle. Jay Wright’s Villanova Wildcats emerge as another tournament favorite, as they are another dominant team featuring a balance of experience, depth, talent and incredible, Bran-like court vision.
The Jon Snow of this year’s tournament is out there somewhere, and if he’s not these aforementioned teams he could just as likely be Michigan, Loyola-Chicago, or Nevada, who all stand alive and fearless after all being pronounced dead at some point or another. Michigan was thought to have virtually no shot at advancing during their second-round match-up against a very underrated Houston Cougar squad. Up by two points with less than four seconds remaining, Houston’s senior forward Devin Davis missed two consecutive free-throws and the Wolverines proceeded to blitz the ball past half-court and hit a miraculous, heavily contested heave from Jordan Poole, an unlikely freshman hero. The agony of heartbreak and the joy of triumph, all summed up in this one image.
No team has overcome more persistent adversity, however, than the Nevada Wolfpack. In addition to the absurd 22-point comeback they pulled off in their 2nd round game against Cincinnati, Nevada also had to mount a 14-point comeback with under 7 minutes remaining against Shaka Smart’s stout Texas Longhorns and his lottery talent Mo Bamba. Collectively, Nevada has only held a lead for four minutes of the entire tournament. And yet this same team, whose top four scorers in the greatest 2nd-half tournament comeback are all transfers, has as good a chance of reaching the Elite 8 as any.
In order to do so they will have to beat Loyola-Chicago, this year’s last remaining true Cinderella. Loyola-Chicago hails from the Missouri Valley Conference, a league that was dominated by Wichita State for the past decade. When the Shockers moved to the American Athletic Conference before the start of this season it opened the door for a new squad to rule atop the MVC. And that’s exactly what the Ramblers have done all season long.
Loyola-Chicago is the Tyrion Lanister of this year’s tournament – a dwarf in comparison to the remaining blue bloods, and nonetheless a worthy contender for the crown. The Ramblers spent just over $500,000 on their men’s basketball team this past fiscal year while Kentucky spent $3 million. If they both win on Thursday these two opposingly-composed squads will face off for a ticket to San Antonio.
Lost amidst all of the scuffle are the forgotten performances by players and teams on the wrong side of defeat. We witnessed a top knot(ch) performance by Houston senior Rob Gray, who put up 62 points in his two tournament games, including a career-high 39 in a first-round victory over San Diego State where he also weaved his way through the defense with 1.1 seconds left to sink an incredibly difficult game-winning lay-up.
Also overshadowed is the performance by the Marshall Thundering Herd, a 13-seed out of Conference USA that gave 4th-seeded Wichita State a taste of their own medicine with a shocking 81-75 first-round upset.
And then there’s the handful of near-Cinderellas, schools like Davidson, South Dakota State, Bucknell, and Stephen F. Austin who rolled with the punches from their favored opponents and fought deep into the second half only to come up just a bit short. Who knows how far these teams could have gone had they just managed to survive game one? But that’s March Madness for you, an extremely complex sequence of games-of-inches, where one early-round bounce has a butterfly effect on the fate of the entire tournament.
The ink is still drying on this year’s script. Only a fool would confidently predict how these final fifteen games will play out. The most sane thing to do is to anticipate more chaos, for chaos is a ladder that all champions must climb.
The Madness is just getting started.