March Madness doesn’t need stars — it makes them. And we’re just getting started

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 24: Samson Johnson #35 of the Connecticut Huskies shoots the ball during the first half of the game against the Northwestern Wildcats during the second round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Barclays Center on March 24, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
By Brian Bennett
Mar 26, 2024

The Athletic has live coverage of the March Madness Sweet 16 matchups.

The NCAA Tournament is not only the greatest sporting event ever created, it’s also the most incredible generator of choose-your-own narratives. You can draw all kinds of conclusions from a 68-team scatter plot:

  • The ACC put four teams into the Sweet 16, more than any other conference. This clearly proves that critics who said the league was mediocre and deserved no more than four bids were completely off base.
  • Or … maybe it was just all about NC State somehow channeling the 1983 Wolfpack for a fortnight. The other three regional semifinalists are North Carolina, Duke and Clemson — the three best teams, metrics-wise, in the ACC. No one ever doubted those teams belonged in the field. Meanwhile, Virginia turned in arguably the worst performance of the tournament in the First Four.
  • OK, well, the Big 12 sent only two teams to the Sweet 16, after getting eight in and being hailed as the best conference in the country all year. This proves that the league was, in fact, gaming the NET rankings and wasn’t as strong as purported.
  • Or … maybe the NET is pretty good after all? Of the top 16 teams in the NET on Selection Sunday, 12 are still playing. Fourteen teams in the Sweet 16 ranked in the top 20. If you correctly predicted that ratio, you’re probably feeling pretty good about your bracket.

We can do this kind of either/or all day, but so far, we can say with some confidence that the first two rounds refuted two myths.

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Ranking the men's Sweet 16 matchups, led by Iowa State vs. Illinois

Myth 1: Who?

The lack of household names on the men’s side would mean March Madness would belong solely to the women, and that all of the player movement because of the transfer portal and NIL has lessened the casual fan’s interest. Instead, TV ratings were mostly up. According to the NCAA, through Saturday this was the most-watched tournament through that stage in history, with an average of around 9 million viewers. Saturday’s games averaged 10.8 million viewers. The tournament doesn’t need stars; it makes them.

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How many people in America had ever heard of 14-seed Oakland’s Jack Gohlke before he became a cult figure for shooting down 3-seed Kentucky and nearly doing the same against NC State? How many knew the name of LeBron James’ high school coach before learning the story of Duquesne coach Keith Dambrot? How about Ryan Elvin, the Houston walk-on who had to make a crucial free throw in overtime to beat Texas A&M in the penultimate game of the opening weekend?

Myth 2: A season of parity

It’s true that an inordinate amount of ranked teams lost on the road in conference play in January and February. You know what you don’t have to do in the first two rounds of the tournament? Play on the road or against conference opponents. The chalk in this year’s field is a cut above; every No. 1 and No. 2 seed made the Sweet 16 for the fifth time since the tournament expanded in 1985 and for the first time since 2019. There’s not a true mid-major in sight, and the only teams seeded below No. 5 are the aforementioned Clemson (6) and NC State (11). Neither is exactly Saint Peter’s.

You can’t blame the chalkiness on the high number of bid stealers watering down the double-digit seeds, either. NC State, after all, was a bid-stealer. So were Oregon and Duquesne, who each won their first-round game. And Oregon pushed Creighton to overtime in Round 2.

No, we just had a clear tier of outstanding teams. Will Warren, in his Substack, predicted this kind of outcome. He dug into the adjusted efficiency margins in the field and found that the gap between the top seeds and those on the 13-16 lines was among the largest of all time and that the teams on those bottom lines had the weakest efficiency margins in 22 years.

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There were some seed-line major upsets along the way — No. 13 Yale over No. 4 Auburn, Gohlke and Oakland over Kentucky, No. 12 James Madison over No. 5 Wisconsin — but none of the little guys had staying power. The two Sweet 16 teams that don’t play in power conferences are arguably the two best programs outside them: Gonzaga and San Diego State. They’ve combined to play in three of the last six national title games. All the pushback on the idea of tournament expansion ultimately revolves around one fear: that true mid- and low-majors will get pushed out.

After one weekend, they’re already all gone. And that should be a great thing for the rest of this tournament.

What comes next

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NCAA Tournament power rankings: Reseeding the Sweet 16 after top teams survive

The Elite Eight could be truly epic with potential showdowns like Houston (or Duke) vs. Marquette, Purdue vs. Tennessee (or Creighton), UConn vs. Illinois or Iowa State and Arizona vs. North Carolina (the Caleb Love Bowl!).

We could have a Final Four that’s as stacked, if not quite as blue-blooded, as 2022, when Duke, North Carolina, Kansas and Villanova made it. Those games drew massive TV ratings, capped by the final between North Carolina and Kansas that attracted 18.1 million viewers. Fans clearly weren’t as enamored with last year’s Final Four, which included No. 9 seed Florida Atlantic and a pair of No. 5 seeds in Miami and San Diego State, plus No. 4 UConn. The final between the Huskies and Aztecs had fewer than 15 million viewers and was the lowest-rated championship game on record. People root for underdogs; they tune in for brands.

This tournament still has UConn, which is trying to become the first repeat champion since Florida in 2006-07 and which has looked utterly dominant. It’s still got Purdue and two-time national player of the year Zach Edey, trying to overcome so much disappointing history, including last year’s loss to No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson. It’s still got the movie-script possibility of an Arizona-UNC matchup. It’s still got the artistry of Marquette’s offense led by point guard Tyler Kolek, the closest thing to Steve Nash the college game has seen in years, and the sheer brute-force toughness of Houston. And it’s still got Duke, the most love-’em-or-hate-’em sports team this side of the New York Yankees.

You can choose whatever narrative you want. The one undeniable truth is that the NCAA Tournament delivered a fantastic first weekend — and promises to be even better in the next two weekends.

(Photo: Jamie Schwaberow / NCAA Photos via Getty)

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Brian Bennett

Brian Bennett is a senior editor for The Athletic covering National Basketball Association. He previously wrote about college sports for ESPN.com for nine years and The (Louisville) Courier-Journal for nine years prior to that. Follow Brian on Twitter @GBrianBennett