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March Madness looks more mild following historically chalky first round
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March Madness action hasn’t exactly lived up to the name yet this season.
The average margin of victory in the Round of 64 this year was 16.7 points. According to OptaSTATS, that’s the largest margin ever for the opening round. Ten of the first-round wins were 25-point (or more) blowouts, also the most ever.
Not only did we not see a 16-seed topple a 1-seed, we didn’t even see one of them come close. In the first round, the top 4 seeds all won by a combined 128 points. Houston won 78-40 after holding its first-round opponent to just 16 second-half points. Auburn won 83-63. Duke obliterated its first-round opponent on Friday, 93-49. And Florida routed Norfolk State 95-69.
The 1s took care of business. So did the 2s, who all advanced by an average margin of 19.8 points per win. The closest game in the 2-15 matchup took place between Alabama and Robert Morris, and the Crimson Tide led in that game for 39 of the 40 minutes.
All the 3s won.
All the 4s won.
If one were to build a bracket and just blindly pick every first-round betting favorite (there were a couple of lower seeds favored over higher seeds), that bracket would have had a 79% hit rate in the first round.
For the first time since 2017, no team seeded 13th or lower advanced to the Round of 32. It’s just the third time in the last 18 years that a team seeded 13th or worse failed to win a first-round game.
What happened in the 2017 NCAA Tournament?
An 8 beat a 1 in the second round, a 4 then beat that 8 in the Sweet 16, and then that 4 lost to a 7 (South Carolina) in the Elite Eight. Each of the top 4 seeds in the South advanced to the Sweet 16, as did 3 of the top 4 seeds in the West. An 11 (Xavier) made the Elite Eight, but it was soundly defeated by a 1 (Gonzaga). The national championship that season pit a pair of 1-seeds against each other — North Carolina against Gonzaga.
Might this year’s bracket send every 1-seed to the Final Four? That hasn’t happened in an NCAA Tournament since 2008.
Kansas, UCLA, Memphis, and North Carolina all advanced to the national semifinals as the top seeds in the 2007-08 season. Across the 15 NCAA Tournaments that have been played since then, only a third of all 1-seeds (20 total) have advanced to the Final Four.
The 2015 NCAA Tournament is the only time since where more than half of the Final Four spots were taken by 1-seeds.
Second-round action for this year’s tournament begins at 12:10 p.m. ET on CBS on Saturday with 4-seed Purdue against 12-seed McNeese.
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Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
