Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Let’s check in our Bracket Challenge Presented by Short Courts, shall we?
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I named my bracket MattBrownIsDumb, and am currently sitting in 110th place, just off the leaderboard. Here’s who is in the top 9:
Friends, we’ve had yet another mostly chalk-heavy first weekend of the Men’s NCAA Tournament. Only one double-digit seed from a non-power league won a game (High Point), and none advanced to the Sweet 16. Only one top-five seed failed to advance beyond the first round. Three of the four one seeds are still standing (sorry, Florida), as are all the two seeds.
Not only have the higher-seeded teams been winning, but they've also been mostly kicking butt. A whopping 13 of the first-round games were decided by more than 20 points, a tournament record.
Last year’s Final Four, if you recall, were all one seeds. The Elite Eight were all one and two seeds except for Texas Tech, who made it as a three. It was about as chalk-heavy as you could get.
This wasn’t always the case. 2023 wasn’t that long ago, when a 15-seeded Princeton made the Sweet 16, Florida Atlantic made a dang Final Four, and 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue. 15-seeded Saint Peter's made the Elite Eight in 2022.
Are those runs impossible now? Is this two-year run of Mega Chalk a historical aberration or the new normal?
I suspect the answer is more complicated than just “yeah, it’s impossible because of NIL and the Transfer Portal.” Consider the following:
The more elite teams are playing differently
Florida under Golden has been among those who’ve led the shift back toward rim dominance. It’s even something he embraced at San Francisco, playing two bigs on his 2022 Dons team that went dancing.
“That was kind of the wave for a couple years, teams that sold themselves as playing a ‘pro-style’ offense and spread out … but when you play that way, you allow a lot of volatility to enter the equation,” Golden says. “When you have the opportunity to recruit bigger, stronger, faster athletes and play a style that allows you to raise your floor with high two-point field goal percentage and get on the glass, that just gives you a better chance to be consistently successful.
Shooting is critically important, and it’s very hard. But God made more 6-1” guys who can shoot out the lights than he made 6’10” guys who can run the floor. Lots of mid-majors have shorter, more athletically limited players who, on the right night, can drop 24 on 65% 3-point shooting. Very few have elite frontcourt players, just like very few mid-major football teams have truly physically elite defensive tackles or edge rushers.
If the teams with the punishing frontcourt guys (your high majors and major spenders) are beating people up down low, it’s much more difficult for smaller teams to spring the upset.
Conference realignment is making mid-majors worse
I hadn’t really considered this angle until Dan Wolken over at Yahoo pointed it out:
Let’s look at 2016 — just 10 years ago. The average pre-tournament KenPom ranking of the No. 15 seeds was 124, the average No. 14 seeds was 105, the average of No. 13 seeds was 84 and the average No. 12 seeds was 73.
Four years ago, in 2022, we had one of the craziest tournaments ever. Here were the KenPom averages: No. 15 seeds were 140, No. 14 seeds were 134, No. 13 seeds were 83, No. 12 seeds were 61. (In that tournament, a 15 seed won a first-round game, two 12 seeds won first-round games and the 4-13 games were decided by a total of 18 points.)
This year? It’s a totally different story. The 15 seed average is around 179, the 14 seed average is roughly 142, the 13 seed average is 113, the 12 seed average is 76.
As you can see, it’s very clear in the numbers that the quality of automatic bid winners filling these Cinderella seed lines has declined over time. The same conferences that put good teams in the tournament are now producing weaker champions
Here’s Dan’s argument. Many of the best mid-major programs from the last decade have changed leagues, often to leagues that themselves don’t generate more than two or three bids a season. The mid-majors then backfill those departures with worse programs…and the league champion still gets an automatic bid.
The best example of that principle, I think, could be the CAA. Over the last 12-ish years, the league lost programs like George Mason, James Madison, Georgia State, Old Dominion, and Delaware…and have’t replaced them with comparable institutions (the league only had three programs in the KenPom top 150 this season). Other leagues like Conference USA, the NEC, WAC (rip) and OVC look completely different, and not always in a positive way.
Plus, if the B1G, ACC, SEC and Big 12 are now megaconferences requiring more than 20 conference games, well, that means there are even fewer schedule opportunities out there for the mid-majors to beef up the ol’ RPIs.
The best teams are just way better
Just as the KenPom rating for your typical 12, 13 and 14 seeds has declined over the last few years, the efficiency ratings for the best teams in college basketball have gotten even better. Again, via SI:
We’ll use KenPom’s adjusted net efficiency margin as the measuring stick for this. In 2021–22, the last season where rosters weren’t substantially shaped by NIL paydays, there was just one team with an efficiency margin north of 30: Gonzaga. This season, eight teams are currently clear of that threshold, and all are above that Gonzaga team’s final mark. Last year, six teams cleared 30. There were 16 teams in 2022 with efficiency margins of 20 or better; this year there are currently 31. Essentially, the No. 4 seeds in this year’s bracket (relative to the rest of the sport that season) are as efficient as No. 2 and No. 3 seeds were in 2022.
To put this another way: this year’s Vanderbilt team, a five seed who lost to Nebraska in the Round of 32, had a KenPom total efficiency rating of 27.35. That figure would line up with the teams that got 1 seeds in 2017. The best teams in the late 2020s were playing at a level that four seeds reach today.
There are lots of possible reasons for this, I think. In the NIL era, it’s now more economical for marginal players to stay in college as long as they possibly can, helping give high-level college programs more size and experience than they might have had eight years ago. International recruiting has expanded even more, giving coaches a pool of talent that may be more skilled, or at least experienced, than American high school players.
And of course, we have the portal era. The best teams in mid-majors, and even some P4 programs, can be offered a lot of money to transfer to the largest and most powerful programs. This robs smaller programs of the continuity and experience that used to be the biggest March advantage of the mid-major, while also allowing the biggest programs to more easily plaster over roster holes from recruiting misevaluations.
And also, let’s not discount luck
In order to spring an upset in March, you have to make the tournament. Plenty of very good mid-major teams, like San Diego State (KenPom: 47), Grand Canyon (KenPom: 56), Belmont (KenPom: 71), Stephen F. Austin (KenPom: 93) or UNC Wilmington (KenPom: 113) missed the tournament entirely, thanks to bad luck in the conference tournament or regular season. Any of those teams, along with others, would certainly be good enough to compete against any 4, 5, or 6 seed they would have drawn in the first round.
To spring an upset, the mid-major needs a favorable matchup and needs the ball to bounce their way a few times. Last year, for example, 12-seeded Colorado State missed the Sweet 16 by a single point, thanks to a Derik Queen buzzer-beater. Michigan barely beat a very good UC San Diego squad.
And this year, Wright State had Virginia in hell for most of that first round game. Kentucky needed overtime to beat Santa Clara. Cal Baptist pushed Kansas late. Shoot, even Siena bulled Duke for most of that 16/1 matchup.
All it takes is one dumb foul here, an airball there, and a logo three from a future insurance salesman, and poof, the 3-seed is on the ropes. Even in a tournament full of blowouts, the little guys made the big ones work multiple times. If the ball bounces slightly differently and Wright State beats Virginia, does the narrative change at all?
Is this the future? I dunno, maybe?
Absent any changes to federal law, NCAA transfer policy, CSC salary cap enforcement, etc, it is hard to imagine a world in the very near future where low- and mid-majors are able to keep their best players on a regular basis. Whatever roster management advantages the Dukes and Arizonas of the world enjoy are probably going to still be there over the next two or three years, imo.
But will basketball still be played the same way? Will the NET (or whatever other metrics the Selection Committee decides to use) remain the same? Will brilliant coaches in the MAAC or Southland figure out a new inefficiency to exploit? Will the little guys finally get lucky in March?
As Kevin Garnett reminded us, anything is possible. I’m not ready to pronounce Cinderella dead and buried as of yet. Rules change, coaches change, and basketball has a funny way of humbling you eventually.
But for now? Cinderella ain’t coming. Perhaps one can argue that NIL and the portal have brought an increased measure of parity to other sports. For men’s basketball…I don’t think that’s the case right now.
