The fact that a 16 seed beat a one and a 15 seed made it to the sweet 16 is only part of the story. Not a single one seed made it to the elite eight and only one 2 seed. The final 4 has two 5 seeds,
a four, and a 9. Only two one seeds made it to the sweet 16. Two one seeds didn’t even make it past the round of 32.
Personally I love it. Only one team from a power five conference in the final four although the Big East in basketball is certainly better than the pac 12 and UConn is a blue blood program and probably the favorite right now. Two teams from so called mid major conferences. The whole thing is unheard of and should be celebrated.
It indicates that BYU is only a few players away from being competitive with the big boys.
The PAC 12 had the worst showing of any of the power conferences. UCLA managed to win 2 games. Every other PAC 12 team exited in the first round. Both the WCC and Mountain West did better.
I didn’t do any direct comparisons but if you look at the Big 10, once again they had a lot of teams invited but overall didn’t do very well at all. Isn’t that how it is for them pretty much every year. UCLA would have done much better if they had their starting center and the Pac 12 defensive POY in there to help them. When you are missing two players that were an important part of your success the entire season that is a killer.
UConn is playing well and I don’t want to take anything away from them but they were handed that Gonzaga game on a silver platter. One of the worst officiated games in favor of one team I had seen in quite some time. Remember this is coming from a “not so fond of Gonzaga” person. The team and coach for UConn was way too friendly with the officials and the officials obliged. I predicted when UConn coasted out to their big lead early in the second half that the refs would start calling fouls on them and they did. The UConn players were puzzled by a lot of the calls but when youre up 20-25, you don’t care as much. The are a NCAA tournament favorite because they are treated like one. It’s called east coast bias and it is alive and well.