Where’s the madness this March? 2019 NCAA Tournament has been tame ... so far
Almost every year, we’re treated to upsets and game-winning, buzzer-beating shots that leave the neutral college basketball fan watching a team that no one, except those attending said school, roots for.
It’s a rite of passage, and why the NCAA Tournament is also known as March Madness.
But the 2019 tournament hasn’t really produced that. It’s been pretty tame and boring thus far.
Cinderella didn’t even make it to the ball this year, save for a couple upsets and close finishes.
Games in 2019 have largely been blowouts.
Just look at the tournament bracket as it shifts to the Sweet 16 on Thursday and Friday:
- 14 of the 16 remaining teams are from Power-5 conferences.
- The two non-Power 5 teams remaining are Gonzaga and Houston, two teams ranked in the top 10 for most of the season that are seeded Nos. 1 and 3, respectively.
- Every 1, 2 and 3 seed made the Sweet 16. Only Kansas and K-State failed to make the Sweet 16 among the No. 4 seeds.
- There’s only one team seeded worse than No. 5 remaining in the tournament, and that is No. 12-seeded Oregon, a Power-5 conference member.
- The first two rounds featured 31 games decided by 10 or more points. Add in one game from the First Four that was won by 10 or more points, and 32 out of 52 games haven’t been close.
- Speaking of the First Four, no team coming out of that game advanced past the first round. Since the field expanded to 68 teams, at least one First Four team had always made it past the first round.
UCF taking Duke to the wire was an instant classic and a game that will be hard to top through the rest of the 2019 tournament. UC Irvine’s win over Big 12 co-regular season champion Kansas State and Liberty’s victory over Mississippi State were upsets. So was Oregon’s victory over Wisconsin, though the Ducks (and some of the other upsets in terms of seeding, 10s over 7s and 9s over 8s) were trendy picks entering the tournament.
Either UC Irvine or Liberty could have been this year’s Cinderella story, but both were eliminated in the second round. Other programs battled the behemoths tough but fell shy of victory, such as New Mexico State and Belmont, which missed chances to upset Auburn and Maryland, respectively.
There isn’t a Loyola-type left. Nor was there a UMBC-like victory in the first two rounds. It’s been a pretty chalky tournament so far.
Maybe that means we’ll get some excitement starting Thursday when the Sweet 16 round begins. Or maybe this year’s tournament is just an indicator that there’s a gulf in talent between the elite squads and everyone else.
This story was originally published March 26, 2019 at 3:22 PM.
