March Madness underdogs still matter, plus the main bracket-picking tip

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First, RIP to former Syracuse quarterback Rex Culpepper. In 2018, he threw a touchdown in his team’s spring game despite being in the middle of cancer treatment. He passed away after a dirt biking accident at age 28.

This Is March: Loving underdogs, whether they win or lose

March has always been the time of year when we get to learn trivia about schools we’d never heard of before. We fixate on weirdly shaped two-stars who leave blueblood heads spinning for no explicable reason. The first week of the NCAA Tournament showcases the conferences that never get showcased.

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But last year produced one of the chalkiest men’s brackets ever, with the closest thing to a Sweet 16 Cinderella being … No. 10 Arkansas, an SEC team coached by John Calipari.

Was that by-the-book bracket just a fluke? After all, we’d seen top-heavy tourneys before the transfer-portal era (2008, 1993, etc.). Three times in the 2020s, a No. 15 seed has made the Sweet 16. FAU-San Diego State was a 2023 Final Four game!
Or was it a sign of the times? Across college sports, it’s getting harder for small programs to compete at a high level. Financial disparity means they rarely get to keep their breakout players.

Maybe both. Either way, endless dominance by big money isn’t something to celebrate, and not just because upsets are fun (as long as they don’t happen to you). Everyone invested in college sports should be thinking about how to preserve widespread competition, not erase it.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t pay attention to things said by former Auburn coach and scandal aficionado Bruce Pearl. Weeks ago, when he lobbied for a then-undefeated Miami (Ohio) to be snubbed in favor of the .500-ish team he’d handed to his son, it should’ve been forgettable bluster.

Except CBS then made him the main character of Selection Sunday, college sports’ most monocultural moment. Same role as the one now played each December by Kirk Herbstreit, the most prominent of the many gripers about G5 teams making the College Football Playoff.

In short, the best thing about college basketball is becoming like one of the worst things about college football, where fans of way too many FBS schools have long felt unwanted. Do we really need all of college sports becoming as snobby as BCS-era football?

But enough of that. You know what? We’re gonna have some fun anyway. College of Charleston is in its first women’s tourney. Same for the California Baptist and Queens men. That rocks, just as much as it ever did.

For more on the little teams, I asked our Sabreena Merchant, who covers women’s hoops, and Brendan Marks, who covers the men’s side, for the minimally heralded teams everyone should know about:

💬 Sabreena: “No. 11 Fairfield doesn’t use traditional positional designations on its roster. The Stags have guards and road runners. Basically, they realized they wouldn’t able to recruit traditional bigs at a mid-major and decided to reclassify the forward/frontcourt group as disruptors who would stretch the floor.”

💬 Brendan: “I am fascinated by No. 14 Kennesaw State, which is without leading scorer Simeon Cottle … because he was federally indicted in January as part of a widespread FBI investigation into corruption and point-shaving. Yet the Owls won 10 of their 17 games without him to go dancing for the second time in school history.”

Did I ask Brendan to pick my alma mater? I did not. The Owls are just that fascinating.

One additional piece of context for this year: Chaotic men’s conference tourneys meant 10 of the bracket’s mid-major reps weren’t the best teams from their leagues, per Kenpom ratings. If and likely when a bunch of them get wiped out by powers, it might not say all that much about the state of the world.

More ways to pick March rooting interests:

Quick Snaps

😮‍💨 This is usually the part of the newsletter where I sprint through a bunch of college football headlines. Since it’s tourney time, there’s only one headline in here today. So let’s take our time building up to it. Obviously, back we go to 1894.

Starting that August, Amos Alonzo Stagg’s University of Chicago Maroons played 17 home games, hosting five fellow members of the eventual Big Ten and the kinds of oddities you see on old schedules, “Chicago Dining Club” and so forth. They also traveled 20 entire miles to play Northwestern.
Somehow craving more football, they went to play Stanford on Christmas and again four days later, squeezing in things like a Jan. 4 game against Salt Lake City’s YMCA on the way back. (Stagg’s previous job: YMCA instructor.)

The Maroons went 14-7-1. In games against peer-like teams, they went 5-4-1. Yes, that means they lost to non-peers. That’s what happens when you play 22 games in 18 weeks during the time when everyone was allowed to punch faces.

Anyway, I bring that up because Louisiana Tech is currently scheduled to play 20 games this season, thanks to the ongoing legal dispute about when it can leave Conference USA for the Sun Belt.

Cram Session: One bracket-picking rule

You probably have tourney picks to finish. I haven’t even started mine. Well, let’s get to it:

Our CJ Moore, who’s good at picking this stuff, advises us to work backward, choosing the national champion first. As for that part:

Matthew Bonesteel used six layers of historical precedent, narrowing the field to the likeliest champ: Arizona.
I applied a version of that method to the women’s bracket, using Sports Reference’s SRS in place of Kenpom. Three No. 1 seeds (South Carolina, UConn and UCLA) passed the test, as did No. 2 LSU.
You could also use r/collegebasketball’s OSOC metric, which has revealed national champs tend to be either One Seeds Or UConn.

From there, the rest of the bracket:

Best chances at men’s upsets, per our math: No. 12 McNeese State vs. No. 5 Vanderbilt and No. 11 VCU over No. 6 North Carolina. Lots more here.
Our women’s staffers have No. 11 South Dakota State beating No. 6 Washington, and they do not believe in No. 3 Ohio State. Full bracket.
We also have computer power-ratings projections for both full fields (women’s and men’s), which will be updated throughout. I see the vision:

Also, before you and I part ways until Friday, it’s a good time to play our 16-question tourney predictions game. I’m calling for four buzzer beaters in the first weekend, because madness is still real to me.

Last week’s most-clicked:Anonymous college football coaches on topics like which teams made the most underrated hires. Look, a college football link!

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