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Seven stats that show how bonkers the NCAA Tournament has been this year
| March 19, 2018 8:53 am
Never has carnage been so much fun.
The opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament was a blast, even as you watched your bracket go up in flames. The Star’s Blair Kerkhoff wrote about the wild weekend. How crazy were things? Here are seven things that show how nutty the first four days of the tournament proved to be.
1. Any veteran player of an NCAA Tournament pool can tell you there are two things you should always do with your bracket.
First, pick the No. 1 seeds in each region to win at least the first game, because a No. 16 seed never wins. Second, pick a No. 12 seed to pull an upset, because that always happens. In both cases, that wasn’t true in 2018. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County stunned No. 1 seed Virginia on Friday night. And all No. 5 seeds won their opening games, and three are in the Sweet 16. That’s most of any seed.
2. According to ESPN, a top-two seed has lost by 20 or more points only four time in the opening weekend of the tournament. It happened twice in a three-day span in Charlotte: UMBC routed No. 1 Virginia 74-54 and Texas A&M thumped No. 2 North Carolina 86-65.
3. Pac-12 teams failed to win a single game in the tournament. Meanwhile, the Mountain West, Missouri Valley and West Coast conferences each have a team in the Sweet 16.
4. Half of the teams that finished in the top 10 of the Associated Press poll have seen their seasons come to an end: Virginia (ranked No. 1), Xavier (No. 3), Michigan State (No. 5), Cincinnati (No. 6) and North Carolina (No. 10).
Eight others in the rankings lost: Arizona (No. 12), Tennessee (No. 13), Wichita State (No. 16), Ohio State (No. 17), Auburn (No. 19), Houston (No. 21), Miami (No. 22) and Florida (No. 23). No. 25 St. Mary’s didn’t make the tournament.
5. This is just the fourth time in NCAA Tournament history that two No. 1 seeds didn’t make the Sweet 16 since seeding began in 1979, according to ESPN. The other years: 2004, 2000 and 1981.
6. A team seeded third or worse is guaranteed to be in the national championship game. The top remaining team in the South Region is fifth-seeded Kentucky, while third-seeded Michigan is the top seed left in the West.
7. According to ESPN, 17.3 million brackets were submitted for its annual contest and three picked 15 of the Sweet 16 teams. None had all 16. Yep, three. However, 62,559 failed to have a single Sweet 16 team. According to ESPN’s Matthew Berry, Virginia, Michigan State, North Carolina and Arizona were among the top seven schools that were picked to win the NCAA championship.
Berry also noted that only 3.7 percent of the brackets had No. 3 Michigan facing No. 7 Texas A&M in the Sweet 16.
