Has the NCAA tournament run out of surprises? Probably not
The best teams are better than usual, but here's a short list of first-round troublemakers.
The men’s NCAA basketball tournament has a problem. Its two most compelling moments are Selection Sunday, when panels of intelligentsia can bemoan the snubbing of the 69th best team in the country, and Upset Week, which, in recent years, has given us a lot of ice cream.
Last year, Oakland, not the Raiders or Athletics but a campus just north of Detroit, beat Kentucky in what turned to be the final Wildcat game for John Calipari. In 2022 we saw St. Peter’s beat Kentucky and Purdue. In 2023, 16th-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson ousted top-ranked Purdue. We’ve seen Duke lose to Mercer (and noted that Mercer Ellington was Duke Ellington’s son) and to Lehigh, and we’ve seen Virginia lose to Maryland-Baltimore County. We’ve seen Abilene Christian beat Texas, and Middle Tennessee State beat Michigan State, and Butler and Gonzaga tear up a lot of furniture before we realized they were Chippendale-caliber themselves.
These are joyful occasions. Not just for the glee of the kids who have just stormed the corner office, the ones who ride buses all winter and stay in hotels with no hallways and wait for their walk down the runway. There’s also the guy in the next cubicle, the one rubbing your face with the bracket that had Georgia State beating Baylor. He’s jumping, too. Before your cellphone became your pathway to sports wagering, this was the ultimate moment of fan interactivity.
But maybe it’s too much ice cream. If upsets happen too often, they lose the shock value. And if they don’t happen at all, we feel cheated, like we’ve gone to a transparent magic show.
Recently, the regionals and the Final Four have lacked the same juice. Connecticut has won 12 consecutive tournament games, none of them close. Meanwhile the best teams in the women’s tournament always get there, although some of them won’t in 2025 because there’s far more than four who deserve to. Nobody wanted to see Caitlin Clark lose in the first round last year, or for South Carolina to lose its unbeaten season right out of the chute. As a result, the women got more TV eyeballs than the men did.
The irony is that we did have a legitimate Cinderella on the men’s side last year, except it wore a Goliath uniform. North Carolina State, champions in 1974 and 1983, needed to win the ACC tournament to even get in. It got five wins in five days to do so. Instead of spiraling into bed and not waking up for weeks, the Wolfpack kept indulging their new addiction to winning. They beat Duke in the regional final and got to the Final Four, a far more unlikely trip that the one made by Jim Valvano and the Cardiac Pack. Yet it’s almost like it didn’t happen, particularly for coach Kevin Keatts, who got fired the other day after a dismal 12-19 season.
This could be the year of the calm handshake, not the frenzied dogpile at the foul line. Conditions aren’t as favorable for the bizarre. For one thing, the whole of college basketball is a bazaar these days, the flesh-peddling done out in the open. On 60 Minutes last week, UConn coach Danny Hurley said “at least 50 percent” of his roster not only has checked out the transfer portal possibilities but knows where it will be playing next year, and for how much.
This has made the best teams better. Most of them are older (with the exception of Duke) and several of them are featuring transfers from smaller schools who, 10 years ago, would be engineering those first-round surprises. Walter Clayton Jr., Florida’s leading rebound and assist man, came from Iona. Alliyah Martin was Florida Atlantic’s Final Four team two years ago. Will Richard transferred from Belmont. They’re the leaders of a team that should get a No. 1 seed on Sunday, and they’re far from alone.
Seven of the top 20 teams in the KenPom.com analytical rankings are from the Southeastern Conference. They’ve slugged it out on a twice-weekly basis for two-and-a-half months now. This week they gather in Nashville for the conference tournament, which the SEC claims, not unreasonably, will be the best men’s postseason event of the year. Calipari, now at Arkansas, says he doesn’t really care about winning it, and sure as hell doesn’t want to climb the mountain to the finals and then lose. That is the salient question, leading up to the NCAAs. Will the SEC teams be too compromised to sail past the rocks of the first weekend? Or will they be so relieved to be playing someone else that they’ll find a second, or ninth, wind?
If they or any other highly-seeded team shows up stale or distracted, these ambitious squads might take advantage.
DRAKE (30-3)
Offensive Rating at KenPom: 77th.
Defensive Rating: 47th.
Best Wins: Vanderbilt, Kansas State.
Worst Loss: Murray State.
The Bulldogs rank dead last, among Division I’s 364 teams, in pace, and they don’t shoot many threes, but they rank first in steals. Four of their players came from Northwest Missouri State, where coach Ben McCollum won four consecutive Division II titles and went 38-0 in 2019. Lots of hoop insiders were waiting for McCollum to get a major college job and their anticipation was justified. The top threat is Bennett Stirtz, who was the Missouri Valley Player of the Year and played in a national-best 98.7 percent of Drake’s minutes. Drake gave up more than 71 points only twice. The impact of a first-round win might be muted because the Bulldogs could be seeded as high as 10th.
UC SAN DIEGO (28-4)
Offensive Rating: 59th.
Defensive Rating: 35th.
Best Wins: Utah State, UC Irvine.
Worst Loss: Seattle
The Tritons won 15 Big West games but weren’t eligible to go to the conference tournament. This year they were, and went 18-2 in the league. They are plus-13 in points off turnovers per game, and local kid Hayden Gray ranks first nationally in steals. Tyler McGhie is the best 3-point shooter, but Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, a New Zealander who transferred from Hawaii-Hilo, has gone to the foul line 274 times and is No. 3 nationally in fouls drawn per 40 minutes. Down the stretch the Tritons had nine consecutive wins of 11 or more points, and only Duke has a better point differential. ESPN has UCSD as a 12 seed.
UC IRVINE (27-5)
Offensive Rating: 169th.
Defensive Rating: 16th.
Best Win: UC San Diego
Worst Loss: Cal State Northridge.
UCI and UCSD are heavy favorites to reach the Big West tournament final, and the loser isn’t likely to get an NCAA bid. The Anteaters are ninth nationally in field goal percentage defense, and are third in 2-point percentage defense. They’re also an 80.4 percent free-throwing team, which is fourth nationally. UCI has a nice blend of youth and experience, with 7-foot-1 senior Bent Leuchten up front. Sophomore Myles Che has been hot from the arc recently. The Anteaters have been the standard in Big West regular-season play, with seven titles for Russell Turner, but have won only two conference tournaments.
YALE (20-7)
Offensive Rating: 55th.
Defensive Rating: 111th.
Best Win: Akron.
Worst Loss: Delaware.
John Poulakidas hit six 3-pointers and scored 28 when Yale knocked off Auburn in last year’s first round. He is back, with his 89.4 free throw percentage, and the Bulldogs went 13-1 in the Ivy League, although they must win the 4-team Ivy tournament to qualify. James Jones has coached Yale for 26 years and is the alltime winner in Ivy wins. Yale isn’t a heavy 3-point team and leans on defense and rebounding, with Bez Mbeng the outside stopper and Samson Aletan the rim protector. Losing center Danny Wolf to Michigan was a blow, but this is a solid program with five Ivy titles in nine years. ESPN projects Yale as a 13.
LIBERTY (25-6)
Offensive Rating: 105th.
Defensive Rating: 38th.
Best Wins: Kansas State, McNeese.
Worst Loss: Western Kentucky.
No team makes it harder to shoot 3-pointers than Liberty does. Opponents hit only 176 in 31 games, a 27.3 clip overall. The Flames hit 38 percent of their deep shots on the other end, and are unbeaten when the opponent scores 70 or fewer. Ritchie McKay has coached Liberty to three NCAA tournaments in nine years and won 30 games in the truncated 2020 season. Taelon Peter is the leading scorer, although he comes off the bench. The Flames have to win the Conference USA tournament to get the call, but if they draw a 3-point-dependent team in the first round, they’ll have a shot. They’re a 12th-seed projection by ESPN.
Love the Cinderella rankings. I'm still hurting from Kentucky's loss to Oakland, because I think that Kentucky team should have played for the title. Another year and another chance.