NCAA Tournament: Sweet 16 brackets, predictions for increasingly mad March

Knowing a sports genius when he sees it, Sankey tapped former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese – surely as smart and savvy a marketer as college athletics ever has seen, especially in the sport of basketball – to advise the conference on what it needed to do to become more of a must-see league nationally. Wisconsin gets another favorable matchup in the Sweet 16, as they’ll face off with a Florida team who lost starting center John Egbunu to a torn ACL.

In the second round, No. 5 seed Virginia lost by 26 points to No. 4 Florida; No. 5 seed Notre Dame lost by 12 to No. 4 West Virginia; No. 3 seed Florida State lost by 26 points to No. 11 Xavier; and No. 2 seed Louisville lost by four to No. 7 MI.

“We wouldn’t be in the Sweet 16 if we were a bad offensive team”, SC coach Frank Martin said after the Duke game. And the South Region’s No. 1 seed was fortunate to survive a second-round game against Arkansas to get there.

No. 8 seed Miami was utterly dominated by No. 9 seed Michigan State in its first-round game. If UNC cuts down the nets in Phoenix in a couple of weeks, the narrative is more likely to resemble something along the lines of “at least there was one legitimate team from that otherwise fraudulent conference” than it is “actually, we were right; the ACC was great all along”. MI got outrebounded 40-21 by Oklahoma State and 37-30 by Louisville.

After being bounced in the first round in each of the past two seasons, the Bears look angry-and talented. They can beat anybody and lose to anybody, in other words, they play to their competition. Throw in the rest of those shot-making guards, nearly all of them veterans, and this is a team you could definitely see winning the rest of the way. There’s no way they’re a 7-seed. Blue Devils head coach Mike Krzyzewski called Thornwell “the best, unheralded, great player in the United States”. With the bubble as soft as it was for this NCAA Tournament, coupled with the few amount of upsets in the First Round, it was only fitting that the Second Round match-ups were as good as they were.

While many people focus on Selection Sunday snubs, seeding could be a bigger issue. West Virginia and Xavier have both been in the top 10 this season, but Arizona and Gonzaga might be the two best remaining teams.

America wants to see the Illinois States, Monmouths and Rhode Islands of the world get a chance to prove themselves against the big boys. I was in the Missouri Valley (Conference). They don’t return your email – and rightfully so.

By contrast, Miller explained, in college: “If you have a bad shooting night, your best player tweaks an ankle, you don’t rebound well – no matter if you’re Villanova, you could be going home”. Go play Arizona, or go play Syracuse – because when you get beat by them, it’s no big deal. We all saw them score 65 second half points against Duke but can they do that again? The SEC suddenly a tough enough proving ground to send three of its five entries into the Sweet 16 when a bastion of basketball such as the Atlantic Coast Conference is left with only one of its bloated nine invitees?

“Obviously they’re hard”, Painter said. It’s just one of those things where you’ve got to be able to guard their athleticism, their quickness.

There are always upsets and you never know where they’re going to come from. Our team defense is going to have to be important.

ESPN has already given us their take, but how do the numbers stack up?

What was truly going to determine whether this year would be a special one for the conference was the play of Arkansas and SC.

Among the others worth remembering: LSU becoming the first 11th seed to reach the Final Four in 1986, which included victories over No. 3 Memphis, No. 2 Georgia Tech and No. 1 Kentucky; No. 11 Auburn’s victory over No. 3 Kansas in 1985; and No. 8 Georgia’s upset of top-seeded Purdue in 1996. Rightly or wrongly, we measure a league as to how it fares in the NCAA.