NCAA Tournament 2023: Ranking the starting lineups of each Sweet 16 team
By Joey Loose
After four exciting and unexpected days of NCAA basketball action, we have our teams for the Sweet Sixteen. Following months of anticipation and dozens of exciting postseason games, we’re down to just those sixteen teams that can cut down the nets in Houston. Certainly, the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament has been filled with unexpected moments and memories to last a lifetime.
16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson got the upset of a lifetime over Purdue and held tough for most of their second game with Florida Atlantic. For a third year in a row, a 15-seed is in the Sweet Sixteen as Princeton has been electric during the Tournament. Both Florida Atlantic and Furman won games on last-second shots, while familiar faces of Tournaments past will watch the rest of this from home.
After just two rounds of play, we’ve seen Arizona, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, and Purdue all sent packing with those Wildcats and Boilermakers suffering monumental first-round upsets in the process. You can certainly argue that those teams were one of the 16 best teams in the nation this season, but they did not belong in this year’s Sweet Sixteen.
Today, we’ll be looking closely at these sixteen teams that are still alive for the national title, but we’re not specifically ranking those teams. We’re going to be ranking the starting rotations of each of these teams, diving into all five members of that lineup and considering their play this season. This is solely based on their current starting lineup, and teams with great benches or a few weaker starters may find themselves lower on this list than expected. Without further ado, let’s dive right in because we have 80 players to examine and more than a dozen teams to rank.