Which 2025 mid-majors/one-bid stars match up well with creators of chaos past?
The final act of the good old days (February)
ANNOUNCEMENT: Hey! It’s not technically March yet. It might be when you finally click on this email or this link. It’s March in Melbourne, I’m guessing. Maybe Japan. I don’t really know. But given that this is a paid post, it seems like a great opportunity to share the following news: as is standard (and thanks to some help behind the scenes), new subscriptions are now $20 for a year for the month of March. You can sign up here.
ALTERNATELY! If you would like to be part of the very best basketball chat on the planet, you can sign up for both Burner Ball and this site for a combined $20 by going here and messaging me once in the chat.
On with the show.
I don’t know if you noticed unless you’re overly online like me, but in the past week, we finally crossed over to Wouldn’t Want to Play This Team Season. Every year, analysts and media types generate a list that ends up being 30 teams deep of Teams You Wouldn’t Want to Play in March. Here is a short list of teams you don’t want to play, per various people: Oregon, Montana, High Point, High Point again, BYU, St. John’s, Memphis, Wright State, and about 50 others. Oddly enough, no one is just putting the top two or three teams in the nation on these lists, which are the teams you actually wouldn’t want to play. Weird.
As much as I hate it, I do find the prompt interesting. Are there ways to determine the teams you actually wouldn’t want to see on your 10, 11, 12, etc. line as a higher seed? Can we figure out, based on previous stats, who might match up with winners in years past?
The good news is yes, we can. I have a sheet I’ve farmed out to a few people over the years that has full team stats from 2002 through 2024. 22 full tournaments of data, and 1,408 teams on the whole, is a pretty good database to pull from. I created a Similarity Score for 2025 teams to every team in the database that’s roughly three parts team quality to one part team stats (Four Factors, Shot Volume, etc.). I took each team’s top 25 comps to build out expected win rates, along with giving a fairly solid sample to the 2025 teams in question. While it’s nice when teams go far in the NCAAT I’m mostly looking for the obvious: who wins in the Round of 64?
What came out was expected in some cases and genuinely quite surprising in others. Along with my own numbers, I’ve provided Bart Torvik’s top comps for teams in question so you can get a better view of more specific examples rather than the overall sample. Lastly, only a specific type of team qualifies here: no one from the Power Five, not Gonzaga, not Saint Mary’s, no one from the Mountain West. I even hesitated about including the WCC at all, but there were a couple of teams worth profiling in there and I kept them in the article.
The top three will be free; the remainder all behind the paywall mentioned above. Let’s get to it.
THE BEST OF THE BEST
1. VCU
15-10 R64 (+4 wins above expectation)
We start with what’s probably the best potential team in this group anyway. VCU’s top 30 at KenPom, has a top-25 defense, and is going to win the Atlantic 10. Torvik gives them around an 80% shot of an at-large bid if they lose in the conference tournament, so if it gets to it I won’t feel too bad rooting for a bid thief.
More importantly, they just match up exceptionally well with previously high-quality 9, 10, 11 seeds. VCU’s comps won 60% of their Round of 64 games. Torvik’s numbers are frankly even scarier: of the eight teams that actually made it to the Round of 64, seven won and three (!) made the Elite Eight or Final Four.
Much depends on the eventual matchup(s) for the Rams, of course, but starting off with a base of a 60% win rate (70% at Torvik) despite being the lower seed in every single comparison is quite remarkable. VCU’s top statistical comp in my database is actually 2015-16 VCU, who won their Round of 64 game and took Final Four team Oklahoma to the wire in the Round of 32.
2. George Mason
15-10 R64 (+4 wins above expectation)
Here’s your first surprise. I really haven’t seen many people nationally talk up George Mason much. At KenPom, they sit 74th, one spot behind Iowa. They have the 212th-best offense. So why do teams like George Mason do so well in March?
A pretty simple answer: defense. GMU’s defense is 17th-best in America, and one of the most consistent things in years past is double-digit seeds with elite defenses outperforming what you’d expect of them. Since 2002, there have been 47 double-digit seeds with top-25 defenses. They went 22-25 in their Round of 64 games, with 10 (!) of them reaching the Sweet Sixteen at least.
Mason’s top comps didn’t go further than the Sweet Sixteen, but an unusual amount of them were tremendous in the first two rounds. Their top statistical comp among 10-12 seeds ended up being 2011-12 South Florida, a First Four entry that had the 165th-best offense in America. USF won their Round of 64 game with relative ease. Torvik wasn’t quite as kind as my numbers were, but the performances of the top few teams here are pretty nice.
3. UC Irvine
13-12 R64 (+3 wins over expectation)
Well, if you liked a George Mason team with the #212 offense and the #17 defense, you’ll love UC Irvine, who…has the #214 offense and #13 defense. UCI’s comps were almost exactly the same in terms of team quality, and as already explored, double-digit seeds with great defenses consistently do quite well in March.
UCI is a little different in that a large part of their system is predicated on tremendous 2PT% defense and shot volume suppression rather than shot volume excellence on the other end. Weirdly, this means they end up having several high-majors as their top comparisons: 2012-13 Oregon (Sweet Sixteen), 2018-19 Oregon (Sweet Sixteen), and 2021-22 Iowa State (you guessed it). Torvik’s numbers produced different comparisons but very similar “whoa” moments in terms of actually not wanting to play UC Irvine in March. We found one.
TEAMS TO WATCH FOR…
You gotta pay from here on out. Sorry. (Also, after this, it gets really into the “they gotta win the conference tourney” territory.)