Remember how ridiculously dominant UConn was last year?
When the Huskies reeled off 30 straight points against Illinois in the Elite Eight?
When they defended their title by winning every NCAA Tournament game by at least 14 points?
When UConn coach Danny Hurley revealed his wife, Andrea, hand-washes his lucky dragon underwear between the Huskies’ games each NCAA weekend as part of some sort of gruesome superstition?
OK, let’s all shudder together and forget we ever read that last sentence.
Well … what if we told you there will be four UConn-style behemoths in this year’s NCAA Tournament? We could have a Final Four in San Antonio where it’ll look like Mothra vs. Godzilla vs. Rodan vs. King Kong — all brawling for immortality in the shadows of the Alamo.
Here’s what we mean: On Selection Sunday last year, UConn was the obvious No. 1 team in the country, according to the polls and, more importantly, Ken Pomeroy’s algorithm. The Huskies entered the NCAA Tournament boasting an adjusted efficiency margin of +32.21.
(This matters because when you’re filling out your brackets and trying to decide which team will win a particular game, you can look at the two teams’ efficiency margins to determine how much one team should win by. In a related note, the nation’s biggest online sportsbooks’ point spreads tend to look awfully close to these KenPom differentials.)
Anyway, here’s why we suggest there are four UConns to enjoy this March.
Going into Saturday’s conference tournament games, No. 1 Duke boasted an efficiency margin of +38.09. Second-ranked Auburn sat at +35.57. Houston, which is about to claim a No. 1 seed for the third year in a row, checked in at +35.40. And Florida, which won by nine last month at Auburn, owned a +34.90 EM.
In other words, all four of these teams enter Selection Sunday looking more dominant than UConn last year.
Now, are we also saying you must pick one of these teams to win it all on your bracket? Not necessarily. Every monster has an Achilles’ heel.
Duke, for example, has three freshmen projected to be lottery picks in the next NBA draft. But Cooper Flagg, the likely college player of the year and the definite No. 1 pick in the draft, injured his ankle Thursday afternoon and sat out the rest of the ACC tournament.
That gives him at least 168 hours of round-the-clock rehab to be ready for Duke’s NCAA opener, but what if he’s only 80%? Is that enough for the Blue Devils?
Auburn, meanwhile, has been the nation’s No. 1 team most of the year. But the Tigers enter the NCAAs with losses in three of their last four games — and memories of getting stunned by Yale in the first round last year.
Houston features all of the toughness, defense and rebounding of Kelvin Sampson’s best teams — but the Cougars also shoot 40% on 3-pointers. That’s the best in the tournament field. So what’s Houston’s potential downfall? Only Drake plays at a slower tempo. Fewer possessions mean a better chance for an upset (think Villanova’s 1985 NCAA title game upset of Patrick Ewing and Georgetown).
Then there’s Florida. The Gators do everything at an elite level — except shoot free throws. In their four regular-season losses, they converted just 75 of 114 freebies. That’s 65.8%.
It doesn’t matter much when you go 18 of 29 at the line on a random Tuesday night in Athens, Georgia, but that can’t happen during, say, a Thursday night Sweet 16 game in San Francisco.
But having these March Madness monsters — and thinking about everything they might destroy and what might be their downfall — is what makes this time of year so wonderful.
Just stay the heck away from dirty underwear, no matter how lucky it might appear to be.
