NCAA Tournament: Expect plenty of madness this March
By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist
We’ve barely touched March, yet the madness has already begun. Don’t expect it to slow down any time soon.
The conclusion of the 2021-22 men’s college basketball season promises to be as unpredictable as any and wilder than most, and last weekend was just the warm-up.
This isn’t a year for chalk. It is not a year when there is a super-team cutting its way through the pack and establishing itself as the frontrunner. It is a time when frankly, your guess is as good as anyone’s when it comes to the NCAA Tournament, even if you’ve only just started paying attention now.
"People get so excited when there are big upsets," FOX Sports bracket forecaster Mike DeCourcy told me. "And I think there will be a lot of them this year."
It took only until mid-January for the last undefeated team to go down. Every squad has lost in conference play, with the exception of Murray State and South Dakota State. Every team has now lost at least three times except for, again, Murray State.
Sure, it is feasible we could see a Final Four filled with top seeds, but a situation where there is perhaps one, or none, seems far more likely. There’s parity, and parity means surprises, and surprises mean brackets getting busted all over the darn place.
We have seen upsets all season long, but that didn’t prepare the sport’s fanatics for the carnage that unfolded on Saturday. No. 1 Gonzaga, with Drew Timme and Chet Holmgren, got smoked by Saint Mary’s. No. 2 Arizona went down, battered by Colorado. Bruce Pearl’s return to Tennessee with No. 3 Auburn ended in tears.
No. 4 Purdue came unstuck against Michigan State. Baylor took care of No. 5 Kansas. And No. 6 Kentucky, faced with an increasingly hot and seriously good Arkansas team, completed the extraordinary six-pack, with No. 9 Texas Tech’s defeat to TCU providing a little icing on top for those who love to see the big trees tumble.
Truthfully, it was an anomaly. Never before have so many highly rated teams fallen like that, one after the other, but there was also a quirk in the scheduling at play. For never before have the top six each faced such strong opposition, all on the road, at the same time.
Even so, this is a wide-open season that provides opportunity for a significant number of teams to go on a run if they survive the early gauntlet of the tournament.
DeCourcy believes the unpredictability has a lot to do with point guard play, namely the lack of a truly elite PG class this season.
"Usually you might have between four to six point guards predicted to go in the first round," DeCourcy added. "This time it might be two. It is almost like having an NFL draft without any good quarterbacks coming out of college football."
Kentucky’s TyTy Washington Jr. appears likely to go high in the NBA draft, while Tennessee’s Kennedy Chandler and Alabama’s JD Davison have also gotten positive reviews. However, the lack of strong play across the board at the position has made it easier for underdog teams to find ways to match up against more esteemed opponents.
The ability to control the ball and the tempo of the game is always critical, but never more so than in the tense moments of the tournament itself.
"Everyone will try to get themselves into the best-seeded positions but there will be lower-seeded teams who will like their chances of going on a deep run," DeCourcy said. "A lot of it can come down to matchups, which teams can survive an unfavorable one and make the most of more beneficial situations."
We are already at the point where things begin to get serious. The fragility of the top teams shook up the rankings this week and has created opportunities for others to emerge as serious contenders.
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Arkansas certainly gave their prospects a boost as they continue to rebound from a shaky start. Saint Mary’s gave Gonzaga the runaround in a way no one truly expected and defending champion Baylor is back in form after a mid-campaign slump.
As for the highest-ranked team not to lose – could things be aligning for Mike Krzyzewski in his emotional final year at Duke? The Blue Devils are not without flaws, and the pomp and ceremony surrounding Coach K’s imminent departure looms over everything, but the Blue Devils should not be discounted.
If it feels like the season has flown by, that is probably because it has. We are now here, where the final shuffle for positioning is underway, where some smaller conference tournaments have already started, and thoughts turn to the makeup of the bracket once more.
It is one of the most anticipated times on the sports calendar, a frenetic window of time when the games come so quickly that you can scarcely keep up. But in a year like this, where the only thing we know about what’s going to happen is that we probably won’t predict it correctly, everyone is in the same boat.
Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.
