NCAA Basketball: Ranking the Sweet 16 teams in 2022 NCAA Tournament
By Joey Loose
After thousands of regular-season games, we get the NCAA Tournament bracket, and the greatest postseason experience in American sports is off and running. Each and every one of those 68 schools is living the dream, no matter the size of the school or how an NCAA Basketball program may have fared throughout the regular season. If your name is called on Selection Sunday, you belong and these programs certainly relished that moment.
Those good vibes last for a few days and then the ball is tipped. Over the course of six days, we’ve seen incredible shots, legendary performances, stunning dunks, and unforgettable moments. Fifty-two of those qualifiers are eliminated, treating us the whole time to some amazing games. Not every game is amazing and not every team eliminated is a bad team, but that’s just the nature of basketball.
We will certainly talk about some of the unforgettable moments of the opening week of the Tournament (hello Peacocks), but we’re going to look ahead as well. The Sweet Sixteen begins on Thursday, with each of those teams earning a pair of hard-fought NCAA Tournament wins to prove that they belong. There are no guarantees in March, and the list of teams upset or sent home already is a long one, filled with Big Ten and SEC teams that are mired in disappointment. Kentucky couldn’t even win their first game after all (hello again Peacocks).
Our next task is not just looking ahead at the Sweet Sixteen but taking stock of where we are. We’ll be ranking the sixteen teams left in the field. This is not merely a reseeding or reorganization of the teams, but ranking them from top to bottom based on the talent and success of the program. A team with a lower seed could absolutely be above a higher-seeded team. Let’s get right into the rankings with the team that has captured the college basketball universe with an unbelievable Cinderella run.