Tag: NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournamanet

2025 Tournament Preview

The 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament lengthens its streak of fielding at least one team making their tournament debut. This is the 86th tournament and each one has featured a first-time team.  This year features four debut schools. They are the University of Nebraska at Omaha Mavericks representing the Summit League, the High Point University Panthers of High Point, North Carolina from the Big South Conference, the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Cougars from the Ohio Valley Conference, and the University of California at San Diego Tritons of the Big West Conference. The Tritons made the field in their first year of eligibility after four mandated transition seasons to Division I from Division II. UC San Diego enters the tournament with the nation’s longest win streak of 15 games.

The Southeastern Conference set a record for the most number of berths by a conference. The SEC received 14 invitations.  The previous high was the Big East Conference in 2011 when they received 11 berths. In that tournament, nine of eleven Big East teams lost in the first or second round, but member team Connecticut hoisted the championship banner.

The SEC has four teams as 1 or 2 seeds. This is just the second time a conference has earned that many top-two seeds. In 2021, the Big Ten also had four top-two seeds, but in that tournament only one of those four advanced to the Sweet Sixteen. That team, Michigan (1-seed), lost in the Elite Eight.

This year’s top seeds are the Auburn Tigers (their 2nd 1-seed), the Duke Blue Devils (their 15th 1-seed), the Houston Cougars (their 3rd), and the Florida Gators (their 3rd). Houston earned a 1-seed for the third-straight season.  The other teams that have been a 1 in three straight tournaments are: DePaul (1980-82), Virginia (1981-83), Kentucky (1995-97), Duke (2004-06), North Carolina (2007-09), Kansas (2016-18), and Gonzaga (2019-22).

A team seeded 4 or worse has made the Final Four in each of the last fourteen tournaments.  For 5 seeds or worse, the streak is eleven seasons. In last year’s tournament, 11-seed North Carolina State and 4-seed Alabama reached the Final Four, but neither reached the Final.

A team seeded 7 or worse has advanced to the Elite Eight in 12 of the past 13 tournaments. The 2019 tournament is the outlier within this stretch.

The Saint Francis University Red Flash from Loretto, Pennsylvania earned their first berth in 34 years. Their only other berth came in 1991. Saint Francis’ Northeast Conference has produced eight different league tournament champions in eight years. The Red Flash are one of only five teams (since 2002) to make the tournament with a KenPom ranking worse than 300.  Saint Francis is ranked 311 by KenPom, the third-worst position for a tournament team.  The worst ranking for a tournament qualifier is the 2018 North Carolina Central Eagles at 316.

2024 Tournament Preview

The 2024 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament continues an 85-year streak that there has been at least one team making their tournament debut. This year’s virgin team is the Stetson University Hatters from Deland, Florida, representing the Atlantic Sun conference.

Conference tournament upsets resulted in an unprecedented number of ‘Bubble-Buster’ teams. Analysts feel that six teams from multi-bid conferences earned an automatic berth when they otherwise would not have made the tournament. This means that those six conferences received an ‘extra’ invitation, stealing a bid from an otherwise higher rated team. Those bubble-busters caused the ‘Last Four In’ – the final at-large invitees – to move up to the number 10 seed line. This is the first time the First Four Round contains games between number 10 seeds.

Twenty-one (21) number 1 seeds lost in their conference tournament this postseason. This is the largest number of conference tournament upsets in at least ten years.

The North Carolina State Wolfpack (11-seed, 22-14) became the first double-digit seed (the ACC 10-seed) to win a conference tournament in more than a decade. NC State claimed their first Atlantic Coast Conference tourney title since 1987 when NCAA champion Jim Valvano was their head coach.

The Iowa State Cyclones’ (2-seed, 27-7) 28-point victory over the Houston Cougars (1-seed, 30-4) in the Big 12 conference championship final was the largest margin of victory over an Associated Press Number 1-ranked program in fifty-six seasons.  The last game to exceed this margin of victory was UCLA’s win (101-69) over Houston in the 1968 Final Four.

The East Region headed by Connecticut has 11 automatic qualifiers (teams that won their conference tournament), the West has 8 AQs, the Midwest: 7, and the South Region: 6.

The Big 12 and SEC led all conferences with eight teams earning tournament berths. The Big Ten and Mountain West tied for the second-most with six teams receiving bids.

If you are looking for information to talk you off prohibitive favorite Connecticut, consider this: no defending champion has made it past the Sweet Sixteen since Florida in 2007. In the past six tournaments, the defending champ was eliminated in the first or second round (1-seed Kansas in 2023, 1-seed Baylor in 2022, 4-seed Virginia in 2021, 6-seed Villanova in 2019, 2-seed North Carolina in 2018, and 1-seed Villanova in 2017).

A team seeded 4 or worse has made the Final Four in each of the last thirteen seasons. In last year’s turbulent tournament, 4-seed Connecticut was the best seed to make the Final Four.

The Duquesne University Dukes (11-seed, 23-11) out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania enter the tournament for the first time in 47 years. This is the longest absence of any team in the field.

The Nebraska Cornhuskers (8-seed, 23-10) have joined the tournament field for the first time since 2014 and eighth time overall. They are the only school from a power conference to have never won a tournament game.

Correlation between Tournament Champions and 1st Round Draft Picks

There’s an interesting article on CBS Sports NCAA BB that poses the question: How important is having a player picked in the first round of the NBA Draft to NCAA Tournament Champions?

Their study reveals that of the 45 men’s college basketball national champions since 1976, 44 featured at least one first-round pick in a future NBA Draft.  The 1987 Indiana Hoosiers (30-4), led by second-round selection Steve Alford, are the only team without a first-rounder.

The article does acknowledge the chicken-and-egg situation of whether NBA teams are attracted to players due to their emerging from a winning program.  Scrutinizing the list of first-round-picked NCAA champions provided by CBS, one can detect a few players whose draft stock was perhaps overly-inflated due to their March Madness run.