And then there were four. Despite all of the madness which consumed much of this tournament (looking at you St. Peter's), the Final Four presents us a far more reasonable group of teams, consisting of an 8-seed, two 2-seeds, and a single 1-seed. These programs, UNC, Duke, Villanova, and Kansas respectively, are among the most storied in all of college basketball, and any finals matchup will have a great storyline behind it save for maybe North Carolina vs Kansas. On that note, I'd like to discuss how we got here in the context of my bracket.
The extent to which my predictions were inaccurate was rather incredible. My logic for picking Gonzaga to come out of the West (and eventually the entire tournament) was rooted in the fact that they weren't the blatantly obvious favorite that tends to lose, and they're simply overdue for a championship considering how much success Mark Few's programs have had over the past several years. I should have had Kansas winning it all just because they had the easiest path to the Final Four of any top seed, but even if I didn't have Gonzaga coming out of this region, I would have gone for Texas Tech. I simply wasn't high on Duke. Despite boasting two of the best wins for any college basketball program (vs Gonzaga and Kentucky), the Blue Devils have a handful of not-so-great losses, and I thought they may pick up another one here. The story of Coach K's final season seemed to be disappointment: lost final home game to Carolina, lost ACC final to Virginia Tech, so I thought Duke may be in for another disappointing result in the Big Dance. With all of this being said, I felt that the theme may instead be that Duke loses everything finals related, making me think that they'd make it all the way to the championship as soon as they got out of the first weekend.
Moving over to the South, it'll be the first of two instances where you see an unjustified amount of faith in the SEC. I had Tennessee coming out of this region, and even though I felt like they may have been overdue for a letdown performance with all the momentum they had coming into the tournament, I was thinking the fact that they were underseeded would ignite another fire in them en route to a deep tournament run. I was once again incredibly wrong here: even if I had Tennessee losing early, it would have been to Colorado State. I also almost had Illinois coming out of this region, who lost to Houston in a game that wasn't particularly close. The Cougars confuse me: I wasn't high on them because they never seemed to win games against tournament caliber teams (losses to Bama, Wisconsin, Memphis x2, SMU), and yet had to be a tournament team until their 3rd match vs Memphis in the AAC Tournament final. Needless to say, the metrics appeared to be correct, and teams with disproportionately strong predictive and results-based metrics (like Michigan) tended to overperform in this tournament.
Yeah, I'm sorry. No chance in hell was I ever going to conceive such a monstrosity of a region. This was almost over before it started, and it proved yet another case where I put too much faith in the SEC. It's also rather amusing how I didn't give too much love to the ACC, but I had Virginia Tech pulling off the upset over Texas and they were the only ACC team that failed to win a game in the tournament. North Carolina feels similar to Houston: consistently bad in games against good teams, yet somehow pulls off a string of wins against legitimately great competition. Even though Baylor's early exit didn't harm me much, the fact that Kentucky lost to the Peacocks ended my hopes early. At least Doug Edert is now a household name, I guess.
Lastly, we have the one region where I actually performed reasonably well, and probably better than most other participants. It's funny how I penciled in this to be my upset region and those upsets actually happened, yet the relative normalness that I had in the other three regions failed to pan out. I knew Iowa was overdue for a bad performance, but I was somewhat surprised that Providence not only kept up their ability to close out games, but took down Richmond in dominating fashion. South Dakota State seemed primed to make a run as a 13-seed, but they did not shoot the three-ball like they normally do on their way to a nine point defeat. As for Miami and Iowa State, I liked how Miami had a legitimately good Quad 1 record, indicating that they would perform against better teams, and that Iowa State was arguably the most underseeded team in the entire tournament and also playing worse than their actual ability. Not being super high on Auburn and Wisconsin helped as well, but I'm still amused that the 11-10 matchup was the only Sweet 16 game I had in my bracket, same for the 1-10 matchup with respect to the Elite 8.
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