After the NCAA men’s basketball pairings came out a week ago Sunday evening, the “experts” quickly chimed in.
“If ever there was a time to pick ‘chalk’ in your brackets, it’s this year,” they maintained in chorus.
“Chalk,” for the uninitiated, is a betting word for persistently picking or putting money on the favorite.
When reading the comments from the so-called “insiders” it immediately occurred to me that they were 180 degrees wrong.
In my mind, the opposite was true.
This year of Covid-19 has never been equalled for the uncertainty it created in college basketball. Some teams played a full schedule, others as few as 13 games. Top programs put on hold by the coronavirus often came back to bad losses, handing mediocre but healthy teams seemingly impressive wins.
The pandemic created reworked conference schedules and games stacked up like cordwood. Down the stretch, the short-benched Bonnies played four games in nine days and that was the rule, not the exception, for many teams.
THE POINT IS, if you picked your bracket relying on the favorites, you’ve likely already thrown it away.
In 31 first-round-games — No. 7 Oregon automatically advanced when 10th seed Virginia Commonwealth was forced out of the NCAAs due to positive Covid tests — the lower seed won eight times, only one of them a toss-up 8-9 game.
Then, in Round 2, lower seeds prevailed in six of 16 games.
So, as we head into next weekend’s Sweet 16 matchups, four of those teams are double-digit seeds: No. 11s UCLA and Syracuse, No. 12 Oregon State and No. 15 Oral Roberts.
Former Bona athletic director Steve Watson’s Loyola of Chicago team, seeded eighth, isn’t even considered a “Cinderella” any more, not after making the Final Four three years ago.
Oh, there are still some high-seeded teams. Three No. 1s advanced but Loyola dispatched the fourth, Illinois.
No. 2 seeds Alabama and Houston advanced, as did third seed Arkansas and fourth seeded Florida State. But that still means nine of the 16 top teams, as selected by the NCAA committee, are gone after two rounds.
Meanwhile, a quarter of the lowest 16 are still alive and Syracuse and Oregon State had to sweat out Selection Sunday to see if they even made the field.
THE MOST spectacular failure was by the Big 10 whose 14 schools got a ridiculous nine NCAA bids and only one, No. 1 seed Michigan, made the Sweet 16. Another first seed, Illinois, didn’t. No. 11 Michigan St. went out in a First Four game. Ohio State, a 2-seed, lost its opener to No. 15 Oral Roberts and had a player receive death threats for missing a free throw. Another 2-seed, Iowa, won a game then was destroyed by Oregon. No. 4 Purdue went out in Round 1 thanks to 13-seed North Texas. Finally, the conference lost to 10-seeds after winning their openers: Maryland to Alabama and Rutgers to Houston.
MEANWHILE, the NCAA committee, while far overestimating the Big 10, drastically underestimated the Pac-12 which has four teams in the Sweet 16.
Besides Oregon and Oregon State, 11th-seeded UCLA ousted No. 6 BYU enroute to two wins and No. 6 USC thrashed third-seeded Kansas by 34 to earn its spot.
IT WAS A horrible postseason for the Atlantic 10.
Of course, there was conference champ St. Bonaventure’s 76-61 loss to LSU in an opening round 8-9 seed game of the NCAA East Regional at Indiana University’s Assembly Hall in Bloomington.
But what about Virginia Commonwealth, the conference’s other March Madness representative?
The star-crossed Rams never even got to play. A second bout with Covid-19 this season, just hours before the Rams were to play Oregon, forced coach Mike Rhoades’ team out of the tourney before they ever got on the court.
Then there was the National Invitation Tournament whose 16-team field was a quarter-filled by A-10 squads.
Richmond ousted Toledo in the opening round and will play Mississippi State in one of tomorrow night’s quarterfinals. However, the other three A-10 teams in the NIT lost in the opening round. Davidson fell to N.C. State, Dayton lost to Memphis and Saint Louis was ousted by Mississippi State.
For good measure, the University at Buffalo, from the Mid-American Conference, was beaten by two in the opening round by Colorado State in the tournament that is being staged entirely at two Texas sites, Denton and Frisco.
As for the Atlantic 10, six of 14 conference teams made postseason tourneys but five of them combined for only one win with VCU never even getting a chance to play.
(Chuck Pollock, a Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)
