Show Me My Opponent, Sweet Sixteen: (9) Florida Atlantic

so many owl puns your head will spin 270 degrees and scare everyone

Well! Here we are. After what felt like an eternity of a wait (five days), this game is finally happening. Tennessee’s Nobody Believes in Us routine fueled a monster 65-52 victory over hated Duke on Saturday, while Florida Atlantic Nobody Wants to Believe in Us For Extremely Different Reasons routine helped them escape 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson on Sunday by nine.

The two paths to get here have been vastly different. Everyone knows Tennessee’s by now, which featured a hot start and a cold finish only to make the Sweet Sixteen with the best on-paper odds of making the Final Four they’ve maybe ever possessed. Florida Atlantic has simply been awesome against lesser competition all year long. No matter who you play, 33-3 is 33-3, and they do own wins over three top 50 KenPom teams (Memphis, UAB, North Texas).

On one hand, if you squint, you could say this is like Tennessee playing C-USA Vanderbilt or Missouri, a team with elite spacing and quality shot selection that produces a lot of open threes. On the other, they did that against KenPom’s 125th-ranked schedule, and their three worst shooting nights came against the three best teams they’ve played. It’s weird enough to play a 9 seed in the Sweet Sixteen so we’ll see what matters and what doesn’t.

BELOW THE LINE ($): many hoots, no hollers