The first weekend of the NCAA tournament wound down pretty much the way it started. There were a few good games, but almost all the higher seeds won. Only one of the top eight seeds failed to advance, and that was Wisconsin, who have looked shaky since the loss of Brian Butch. Purdue gave Florida a surprisingly good game, and Nevada hung with Memphis for a good while, but the only other upsets by seed were in the 4-5 games, with trendy pick Texas and VA Tech both losing.
This is the chalk-iest tournament in recent memory, and my personal theory is that this is closely related to the other big story of the tournament thus far, namely the fact that the selection committee took fewer at-large teams from small conferences that they have in the past couple of years. There were some good reasons for this, of course, as there weren't all that many upsets in the conference championship tournaments (relative to some years), but the end result is that you get more low seeds given to the weaker teams from power conferences, and fewer strong teams from lesser conferences.
This leads to fewer early-round upsets, I think, because the lower-division teams in the power conferences are at the bottom of their league standings for a reason: they can't consistently beat the better teams in the power conferences. You pretty much know what you're going to get when you put USC against Arkansas, or Stanford against Louisville.
The smaller conferences, though, tend to be systematically underrated by most of the ranking systems out there, which conceals the fact that a lot of the better teams from small conferences will give teams from the power leagues a pretty good game. When you have more of the winning teams from smaller conferences, you get more upsets, and when you have more mediocre teams from power leagues, you get, well, what we got this weekend: a relatively boring first weekend.
Sports pundits are already trying to make lemonade out of this situation, trying to whip up some enthusiasm for the match-ups of higher seeds, but I think that misses most of the charm of the tournament. I don't really care about games between two teams that have already been on ESPN a hundred times, and analyzed to death. What I like in the second weekend is to see match-ups between power-conference teams, and teams that nobody expected to be there. I want to learn about new teams that I haven't already heard Dick Vitale screeching about.
- Log in to post comments
I have not seen any comments about this, but how much of the credit - or blame - can be placed on the "uneven" refereing this year? In particular, I thought Wisconsin got jobbed big-time on Saturday... And did these refs get told to forget about offensive fouls? Since David Stearn has been linked with bad-ref stories, in the past, is he filtering down his satanic control on the NBA minor leagues, I mean NCAA teams?
What's up with that?
Quote: And did these refs get told to forget about offensive fouls?
I beg to differ. I don't think I have ever seen so many offensive fouls called. The call at the end of the Maryland game was especially bad.
You omitted the other "upset by seed", Vanderbilt over Washington State. Perhaps because the idea that WSU should be a 3 seed was always laughable.