The selection committee gave 13 tourney bids to Big Ten and ACC teams this year, and only two made the Sweet 16 the committee gave a total of six to the WCC, AAC, C-USA and Ivy, and four made it to the second weekend.Ģ - AAC /755EcxaeIN- NCAA March Madness March 12, 2023 You could make the case that the last couple of NCAA tournaments have been excellent despite themselves. Of the last four at-larges in the 2023 field and the first four out, seven were from power conferences. the most renowned of the mid-major conferences. This year, only three did: the Mountain West, AAC and West Coast Conference, a.k.a. On average, only 3.7 other conferences, besides the power six, have gotten multiple bids. Over the past seven tournaments, the percentage of at-large bids going to power conferences has increased to 85%. The Atlantic 10 got six teams in that year the A10's Dayton reached the Elite Eight, and the AAC's UConn - technically a mid-major at that specific moment in time - won it all. The 2014 tournament, for instance, featured 10 total multibid conferences. Even the more recent tournaments on that list were diverse and outstanding. Outside of that group, an average of 4.9 other conferences got multiple teams into the field, 5.3 if we include 1980s independents as their own entity. In the top eight tournaments from that list - 1985, 1990, 1983, 2006, 2010, 2014, 19 - 75% of possible at-large bids went to teams from what we could call power conferences: the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 (or, for the 1980s tournaments, the Big 12 and SWC), Pac-10/Pac-12 and SEC. Last year I ranked all of the NCAA tournaments going back to 1979, concocting a formula that took upsets, close games and generally memorable moments into account. So why aren't more mid-majors getting tourney bids? At worst, the success of mid-majors in the NCAA tournament hasn't hurt anything. ESPN's TV ratings this season were reportedly as high as they've been since before the pandemic, and Thursday's first-round TV viewership was the highest in eight years. But the NFL also hasn't suffered because of the big-brand Dallas Cowboys' annual failures (they haven't reached a Super Bowl in 27 years).Īt its best, parity convinces a huge number of fan bases that their team can win it all - or at least make a huge run - and hopeful fans are engaged fans. TV ratings tend to benefit from the presence of at least a few blue bloods, after all, and lord knows sports like European soccer haven't suffered all that much from a lack of input from upstarts. We can debate how we've gotten here - it probably has more to do with the diminishing quality of the top teams than the bottom teams - and we can debate whether this is actually good for the sport. Joe Lunardi: 16 reasons to pay attention the next couple of weeks.It made for one of the NCAA tournament's more delightful opening weekends in recent memory (even without all that many close second-round games). Players, coaches and fans from Kennesaw State to Furman to, of course, Fairleigh Dickinson, all got their moments in the spotlight on Thursday and Friday, and Princeton and Florida Atlantic will get another go-round this coming weekend. Parity is as strong as ever in college basketball. We're openly pondering a Final Four with no 1-seeds, and the Elite Eight could feature up to four programs from what we typically call mid-major conferences. The Sweet 16 will not feature any of Kansas, Duke, North Carolina or Kentucky for just the fourth time in 70 years. 15 in the Elite Eight for the second straight year. No 15-seed had reached the Sweet 16 until Florida Gulf Coast did it in 2013 now it has happened for three straight tournaments, and Princeton is one win away from putting a No. In the first 28 tournaments that featured 15-seeds (1985-2012), four 15s had beaten 2-seeds. No 16-seed had ever beaten a 1-seed in the men's NCAA tournament until 2018.
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