March Madness: Why lack of Madness might be a good thing moving forward
Lack of upsets
Early upsets often cause excitement and generate a buzz for the opening weekend of March Madness, but as the tournament plays out, often times these lower seeded teams gets exposed leading to lesser quality games when they should, in theory, be more competitive.
Let me be very clear: I love me a good upset. The feeling of watching the plucky underdog Mid-Major knock off the vaunted Power 6 team is damn near unmatched in the world of sport. But while it’s exciting, it’s equally dull watching that same team run into a buzz saw in the preceding rounds that even some of the higher quality teams would struggle with.
As the brackets have it, each region has their top 3 seeds in the Sweet 16 with the outliers being Oregon (12 seed) and Auburn (5 seed) in their respective regions,
When you start scanning the TV schedule for the games, this is where we should start to be a little more thankful that we have a lot of chalk on our hands to this point. As we advance throughout the tournament, the stakes get higher and therefore we want the highest caliber teams to compete, thus giving us what should be the best possible outcomes.
I admit, my heart stomach sank when UCF failed to knock off Duke in their Round of 32 clash. In the moment, I was hoping that the Aubrey Dawkins lay-in would fall and we would see Tacko Fall advance.
A few days later, that changed. Rather than the underdog trying to survive and advance, we get a Duke/Virginia Tech rematch where neither team had their key players–Zion Williamson and Justin Robinson respectively–when they faced off back in late February.
Now we get both teams at full health with higher stakes. This is more captivating and must-see-TV than any near-double digit seed moving on to the Sweet 16 should be.
In no way am I belittling the magic of March and the platform it provides, but would you rather be watching Ja Morant struggle to drag Murray State throughout a some-what compelling game against 1-seed Gonzaga, or see if the Bulldogs can keep up with the red-hot Florida State Seminoles?
I love me some Mid-Majors, but I love some quality March basketball a little bit more.