If you woke up in the morning shocked by the outcome of the NCAA tournament, you fell into a deep sleep last March.
There were only seven upsets in the first round, and a few of them were barely upsets. For the first time since 2017, no 13th, 14th, 15th or 16th seed won a first-round game. The only double-digit seed to advance to Week 2 is Arkansas, a team that struggled in the regular season and has one of the most expensive rosters in college basketball, rather than the mid-major Cinderella that many of us crave.
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By the time the Final Four arrived, the bracket had become so tight that all No. 1 seeds advanced for only the second time in tournament history.
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After the kind of tournament where the Sweet 16 teams come from power conferences, it’s natural to wonder if the mid-majors are on the verge of extinction in this event. With the Frankenstein mega-conference that resulted from the last round of reorganization, and the massive financial disparity that incentivized top mid-major players to move to power conferences, there’s reason to wonder if last year’s tournament is about to become the norm.
I’m not sure. The same goes for Tennessee State’s Nolan Smith. The 37-year-old, a first-time head coach, has spent much of his basketball career playing at heavyweights like Duke, Louisville and Memphis, but now finds himself as the No. 15 seed in the Ohio Valley Conference against second-seeded Iowa State.
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“I think you’re just faced with some very expensive rosters and some very cheap rosters, right?” Smith told Yahoo Sports in a phone interview this weekend. “But when they get between teams, those very expensive players have to wake up and play. And they wake up with some money in their pocket. So you might catch them on a day where they’re feeling really weak. I think no matter what, you’ve got to play.”
Even in a time of dizzying systemic change in college sports, Smith’s belief in the bracket’s ability to endure and balance reflects my assumptions about the NCAA tournament. As long as mid- and low-major games are allowed, and games are 40 minutes long and the scoreboard starts at 0-0, there won’t be a significant difference in the number of upsets over time.
The reason is simple: The chaos of the NCAA tournament never followed a formula or made sense on a spreadsheet. Why start now?
UMBC was the first No. 16 seed to defeat No. 1 seed Virginia during the 2018 NCAA Tournament. (Jared Tilton/Getty Images)
(Jared C. Tilton, Getty Images)
Yes, the sport has changed dramatically over the past few years. There are fewer mid-level programs that can maintain their core strength over multiple seasons and build an experience advantage over a one-and-done factory. Any freshman or sophomore who shows even a glimmer of promise at a lower level will be identified and scooped up by a big-spending program in the SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big East or Big 12.
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If you look back at some of the great mid-major conference teams, like Wichita State from 2013-17 or Loyola Chicago from 2018-21, it’s nearly impossible to replicate in this environment. You simply can’t keep a player like Fred VanVleet or Cameron Krutwig in the Missouri Valley Conference for four years, where their value to a power conference program would be millions of dollars.
But the NCAA Tournament remains an event defined by variance. In a single-elimination tournament, a 40-minute basketball game played at a neutral site with unfamiliar referees creates a level of discomfort and stress for 18- to 22-year-olds that they often don’t handle well no matter how much money they’re paid. Sometimes, a team with nothing to lose can get on the stage and start shooting in bulk.
This is how the championship has always been and hopefully always will be. Whatever happens to cause massive chaos doesn’t need to be sustainable or even explainable. As long as it happens once, it can shock the world.
Maybe that’s too naive about the new reality of college sports, but I’d need to see more than a year like 2025 to believe that the chaotic era of March is now just one more thing ruined by conference commissioners and NCAA officials.
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After all, just two years ago we had a No. 14 seed (Oakland) beating a No. 3 seed (Kentucky), a No. 13 seed (Yale) beating a No. 4 seed (Auburn), a pair of No. 12 seeds winning first-round games, and a No. 11 seed at NC State suddenly making the Final Four. Just the year before that, we had a first-round game where No. 1 seed Purdue and No. 2 seed Arizona were both suffocating mid-majors and they had no reason to lose to them.
That’s the real thing about NCAA tournament upsets: They never make sense from the start.
UMBC team becomes first No. 16 team in 2018 to beat a No. 1 seed? It finished second in the league with three wins and lost its only two games against strong opponents that season by 25 and 21 points.
St. Peter’s team goes from No. 15 seed to Elite Eight in 2022? It lost 11 games in the regular season and showed absolutely no sign it could beat teams like Kentucky and Purdue.
Doug Edert and No. 15 Saint Peters defeated Kentucky, Murray State and Purdue before falling in the Elite Eight of the 2022 NCAA Tournament. (Zach Bollinger/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
(“Icon Sportswire” via Getty Images)
Or how about an Oral Roberts team that beat Ohio State and Florida State in 2021 and nearly beat Arkansas in the Sweet 16? It finished fourth in the Summit League and eked out a couple of conference tournament games by five points overall to steal the automatic bid.
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By any possible standard, these teams are not considered teams capable of competing with power conference opponents. However, the special nature of this event is that one player’s heat on one day can completely change the dynamics of a 40-minute basketball game, making the near-impossible something that has happened time and time again throughout the history of March.
Even with the big guys paying huge NILs and phasing out mid-major league rosters every year, this part doesn’t seem to be changing.
“The funding gap between mid-level majors and upper-level majors is very different,” Smith said. “But like I’ve told my guys all week, we go into the tournament being who we are, no matter who we play or how much money they have.
“Honestly, we’re not even talking about frustrations or Cinderella stories or anything like that. All my guys and I talk about is just being us, being champions, being a confident team and being ready to play basketball the way we’ve been all season long. At the end of the day, the game of basketball is the game of basketball. They’re going to wake up like we woke up. It’s a game of man against man. No one is invincible and no one is unbeatable.”
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Maybe this assumption will turn out to be wrong. Perhaps injecting big money into the top squad will make the men’s tournament more akin to the women’s tournament, which has historically had a huge gap between the top teams and the rest, resulting in few early upsets.
But hopefully last year’s tournament will be more like 2017, when the only first-round upsets came to the No. 10 seed, three No. 11 seeds and one No. 12 seed, with only one double-digit seed making it to the second weekend. Because year two reverted to average, with two No. 9 seeds making it to the Elite Eight, two No. 11 seeds making the second weekend, and half of the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds getting eliminated in the second round.
It was as if the universe corrected itself in real time, preserving the uniqueness of arguably the best event in sports.
My guess is that this will happen again starting this week.
