The Point Is There Ain't No Point
bellyachin'
(9) Florida Atlantic 79, (3) Kansas State 76
(4) UConn 82, (3) Gonzaga 54
(5) San Diego State 57, (6) Creighton 56
(5) Miami 88, (2) Texas 81
So: I used to have a certain frame of mind about the NCAA Tournament. I liked the first-round upsets. I think everyone does. I liked the Round of 32 upsets too, except when they affected my all-precious bracket. And then you’d get to the second weekend, a team you actually really liked would get sent home, and then by the Final Four, a team who had a middling regular season would be in the Final Four while your precious 1-seed hipster choice had been sent home.
At one point in time this greatly annoyed me. Why is the NCAA Tournament like this? I think we all like upsets, but at some point, we’d like a little bit of normalcy. Certainly last year’s Elite Eight Sunday would’ve sucked less if it were Kansas vs. Auburn or UCLA vs. Purdue or even UNC vs. Purdue. When the 10 and 15 seeds that got there flopped out, well, it was sort of predictable. Ah, but I was so much older than that then; I am younger than that now.
Every time I look at this year’s Final Four I simply gotta laugh. You have UConn, a consensus top-6 metrics team entering the NCAA Tournament, but they were a 4 seed. Everyone past them is some sort of fascinating outlier.
San Diego State, a 5 seed, entered this Tournament in the KenPom top 15 and was obviously a very good team all season long. They also had the 64th-best offense in America, a ranking that’s actually fallen to 75th-best over the course of the Tournament, and that makes them the worst offense to touch the Final Four since 2017 South Carolina. Only one other team - 2012 Louisville - has possessed a definitively worse offense and made the Final Four.
Miami, a 5 seed, was mere minutes away from losing to a 12 seed in the Round of 64. Beyond that, they entered the tournament 40th in KenPom; they’re the first 1-6 seed to ever make the Final Four while being ranked outside of the top 20. They also had a defense ranked 132nd entering March, which makes them the second-worst defense of all time (2011 VCU) to get to the Final Four.
Florida Atlantic, a 9 seed, is a giant outlier because they’re a 9 seed that made the Final Four, which almost never happens. Beyond that, they’re just the seventh Final Four team to make the Final Four while being favored to lose in the Round of 64.
This exact Final Four pairing had just a 0.0015% chance of happening, or roughly a 1-in-66,225 chance. It’s the second least-likely Final Four in the KenPom (2002-present) era behind 2011, where no team had even a 15% chance of getting there before March Madness began. Even 2006 at least had a 2 and a 3 seed in it. This is relatively uncharted territory for Upsetville, USA.
As such, there’s a lot of bellyaching out and about on Twitter - always Twitter - about this exact scenario.
The largest sourcing of complaints generally comes from college football or professional football obsessives, who cannot understand a system that doesn’t inherently give outsized weight to an elite few. While football is capable of possessing its own interesting levels of variance, it doesn’t typically lend itself to a lot of chaos in the way basketball can.
I think that’s fine. I don’t watch the NFL Playoffs or the NBA Playoffs or even the CFP (as bad as it was pre-2022) for the upsets. I do watch the NCAA Tournament for that, because that’s what’s beautiful about it. What the But The TV Ratings and I Need My Blue Bloods people do not understand is that the upsets are March Madness. You would not call it March Madness if it didn’t have upsets in it. It wouldn’t be mad. It would be March Calm App.
Maybe this is a little too self-driven as someone attending their first Final Four this year, but, well, I love this. There’s a ton of beautiful stories woven into these four teams. UConn obviously has the greatest history of any of them, but it’s a program that was left for dead just a slight few years ago and has undertaken a complete program overhaul under Dan Hurley. San Diego State has been chopping away at this for two decades and finally got their overdue deserved outcome. Miami’s got a Hall of Fame coach who needed one last Final Four run to cement said HOF case. Florida Atlantic…well, look at the name Florida Atlantic.
These are the stories people far too obsessed with Is This Good for the Sport? and Will People Still Watch? storylines keep missing out on. Was this the best possible Final Four? Obviously not. Are there a couple of teams here I’d trade out for teams I preferred watching? Well, yeah, I wish Houston were still here or even Texas. But who cares? This is the most emblematic Final Four of its given season: a historically tight gap between the top and the bottom of the sport has led to a historically insane tournament.
Besides, what matters most about March is this: the higher seeds, contrary to Mr. Volin’s preferred status, don’t start each game with a lead. The lower seeds don’t either.
It does not matter where you came from. It does not matter where you grew up. What your family situation was. What city or ZIP code you call home. It does not matter what conference your program is a member of. It does not matter how many NCAA Tournament games you’ve won before. It does not matter how many NCAA Tournaments you’ve been to.
When that ball is tipped, you and your opponent, no matter who you are, have the same score. You have 40 minutes to outscore each other, and you start as equals. That’s March to me. I hope it is to you.
Quick-hitters here:
HOUSTON. Another reminder: I am headed to Houston to cover at least some part of the Final Four for this very website. If you’re also going, reply to this email or send me a message on Twitter (@statsbywill) and we’ll meet up. I’m also attempting to get a group run together at some point, though predictably it will be hot as Hades in Houston this weekend.
On luck. San Diego State would undoubtedly not be here if not for one of the greatest runs of opponent shooting luck I think I’ve ever seen. SDSU’s opponents in the NCAAT have shot 16-for-94, or 17%, from deep. No other Sweet Sixteen or further team, from 2010 to present, has forced opponents to shoot 19% or worse. Eventually, that will bite them…but again, this is a team that held all opponents to 27% from deep away from home this year. They’re an elite defense. Plus, the Mountain West badly deserved some opponent shooting luck in March.
Odds! Odds.
I think these are very fair. I’d take UConn to win it all as of now.
Final Four previews will be up Friday afternoon. I’m doing a full Tennessee-style one for each game.
Love this take Will. Those that want March to be more like CFP are so far off they may be irretrievable. As for your comp of SDSU & 17 South Carolina via subpar offensive numbers, big difference is that Gamecocks outperformed those efficiency numbers during NCAA Tournament significantly while SDSU has somehow backslid. SC was a bit more like UConn that year. Strong in non-con & NCAA, ups & downs in SEC play. 6-game suspension of Sindarious Thornwell made non-con look less dominant than it would’ve with him. Otherwise, I think that’s a 1-loss team going into SEC play.