March Badness

If you root for upsets, then the first second round of the 2013 NCAA tournament was for you.  Ten higher seeds won games on Thursday and Friday, including one 15, one 14, one 13 and three 12s, and trendy Final Four selections like New Mexico and Georgetown were sent home early.  Like most college hoops fans without a team to root for, I love to see all of the upsets - it's a large part of what makes this tournament so exciting.  And while it's true that parity in college basketball in increasing, I'd argue that it's not so much that teams like Harvard or LaSalle are much better this year than 13 and 14 seeds normally are.  Instead, this year's high-seeded victors seemed to take advantage of some ugly basketball by their heavily favored opponents, making this year's major upsets a little less satisfying than the Cornell-esque runs we've seen in the recent past.

That's not to take anything away from the likes of the Crimson, Explorers, the Oregon Ducks, the Ole Miss Rebels or the Cal Bears.  Each of these teams came into tournament weekend ready to play (and, is LaSalle's case, had to meet another tournament worthy team just to get a shot to play on Friday) and got the job done.  But as I watched at least part of each of these upsets, I wasn't particularly impressed with any of these supposed Cinderellas.  While Harvard played solid defense, it was really New Mexico's inability to hit a shot that lead to their demise.  Ole Miss managed to win despite a terrible game from their star guard Marshall Henderson because Wisconsin simply can't score consistently.  The only major upset team that actually looked aggressive, cohesive and threatening was, shockingly, Florida Gulf Coast, who used their athleticism and intensity to beat up on Georgetown.  For their part, though, the Hoyas and Big East Player of the Year Otto Porter Jr. looked dazed and confused from the opening tip to the final whistle.

The Big East sent eight teams to the 2013 NCAA Tournament and is supposedly the strongest conference in the country.  Of those eight, only Syracuse, Louisville and Marquette (barely) survived; in addition to Georgetown, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh and were knocked out by higher seeds the Cincinnati and Villanova were pushed around by beatable opponents.  We spent the year talking about how the Mountain West had the highest RPI of any conference, but of its five tournament teams only Colorado State and San Diego State made it through, while New Mexico and UNLV were upset badly.  Meanwhile, LaSalle had to beat the Mountain West's Boise State just to get a chance to play Kansas State, which suggests that the NCAA tournament selection process isn't as efficient as it needs to be.

If the NCAA is trying to create drama by matching overrated Big East and Mountain West teams against sneakily strong mid-major opponents, they're doing a great job.  In reality, however, this week's upsets are as much about overrated NCAA favorites getting matched up against feistier, psyched-up opponents with nothing to lose.  As much as I'd like to credit teams like Harvard for rising to the occasion, I find it hard to believe that a team that recently lost to Columbia and Princeton is all of a sudden evenly matched against the Lobos, the best team in the supposedly toughest conference in the nation, despite not playing particularly well.  Instead, the Crimson were the beneficiaries of some sloppy seeding by the NCAA and took advantage of it - like any group of smart Ivy Leaguers would do.