Get Ready, Buckeyes! Championship Push Looms!
There wasn't much Madness in March last year. But there's reason to believe that tourney was just a blip and the upsets will reign once again.
If being shocked by the outcome of an NCAA tournament game is what gets you out of bed in the morning, last March turned into a deep sleep. The first round saw just seven upsets, and a few of them barely qualified as upsets. For the first time since 2017, no teams seeded No.
13, 14, 15 or 16 won a first-round game. The only double-digit seed to advance to the second week was Arkansas, an underachieving regular season team with one of the most expensive rosters in college basketball — hardly the mid-major Cinderella many of us crave. And by the time the Final Four came around, the bracket was as chalky as it gets, with all No.
1 seeds advancing for just the second time in tournament history. [ Enter Yahoo Fantasy Bracket Mayhem now for your shot at $50K ] After that kind of tournament, where each of the Sweet 16 teams came from a power conference, it was natural to wonder whether mid-majors are on the verge of extinction in this event. Between the Frankenstein mega-conferences that resulted from the last round of realignment to the huge financial disparities that incentivize top mid-major players to transfer up to the power leagues, it’s fair to wonder whether last year’s tournament is about to become the norm.
I’m not so sure. Neither is Tennessee State’s Nolan Smith, a 37-year-old, first-time head coach who lived most of his basketball life among heavyweights like Duke, Louisville and Memphis but now finds himself leading a No. 15 seed out of the Ohio Valley Conference against No.
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