Sweet 16 possibilities

Is the upset dam about to break?

                         Elite8 Final4 Final  Champ
 1W  Arizona              78.5   54.8   32.1   19.5   
 1E  Duke                 75.1   52.9   34.0   19.0   
 1MW Michigan             76.3   51.0   30.1   18.3   
 2S  Houston              52.7   36.3   19.1    9.2   
 3S  Illinois             47.3   31.7   15.8    7.2   
 2MW Iowa St.             64.1   28.3   13.3    6.6   
 2W  Purdue               75.2   31.5   13.9    6.5   
 3E  Michigan St.         51.5   18.7    8.4    3.0   
 2E  Connecticut          48.5   17.1    7.4    2.6   
 4S  Nebraska             58.5   20.4    7.4    2.3   
 5E  St. John’s           24.9   11.3    4.5    1.3   
 6MW Tennessee            35.9   11.0    3.7    1.3   
 4MW Alabama              23.7    9.7    3.3    1.2   
 4W  Arkansas             21.5    9.2    2.7    0.9   
 9S  Iowa                 41.5   11.6    3.4    0.8   
11W  Texas                24.8    4.6    0.9    0.2   

Those are the probabilities for the Sweet 16. The Big 3 are still the favorites, although we have a Big 4 if you consider the winner of Houston/Illinois as one entity. The fourth- and fifth-most likely champs are playing in a Sweet 16 game. I suppose it could be worse. Something like this happened in a second-round game before the age of analytical enlightenment.

I’ll tack on a little stream of consciousness as a bonus for the ball-knowers. First, through the first two rounds (ignoring First Four™ games) we’re tracking for the highest scoring tournament in the modern era.

2026: 75.2
2017: 74.3
2024: 73.7
2002: 73.1
2025: 72.8

There’s been the natural regret over the lack of non-power league teams in the Sweet 16, but that’s offset by the fact that the quality of ball has never been better. Vandy/Nebraska and Iowa/Florida were incredibly entertaining games. There is a segment of fans out there (we call them old-heads although there are certainly some youngsters in this group) that would say scoring going up is not a sure sign of better ball. Please think about the defense, they’re mumbling as they read this. And certainly there’s a limit to the idea that more scoring equates to better ball. The 2024 NBA All-Star game is somewhere beyond this limit.

But defenses are actually trying in the college game, especially in the tournament. It’s just that offense is so much more skilled that it used to be (and we got rid of the secondary-defender charge). There are still things to improve in the college rulebook, but the game has come a long way in the last 10 to 20 years.

I said defenses are trying, but I’m not totally sure Arkansas is trying. Their chosen strategy against High Point appeared to be to simply ignore the defensive end because they had the talent advantage to put up as many points as needed on the offensive end. That approach was successful, though it was a struggle. High Point made 24 (64.9%) of 37 2’s. Their 5-10 point guard, Rob Martin made 8 of 12 2’s - and he’s a poor 3-point shooter!

Arkansas now ranks 275th in the country in 2P% defense, which makes their matchup with Arizona interesting given the Wildcats’ large dependence on two-point shots. It seems impossible that a team with Trevon Brazile in the lineup would have a lousy interior defense and Arkansas does have the excuse they were down to six rotation players against High Point. But this has been a pattern all season.

Speaking of dependence on two-point shots, John Gasaway commented on Todd Golden commenting on the lack of tournament upsets. You can read John’s piece for the full quote, but the idea was that the best teams are using less risky strategies.

However, the 16 remaining teams have collectively taken 40.1% of their shots from 3-point range. That’s not a record but if I told you it was the second-highest ever, the ball-knowers out there could easily guess that the record was set in last season’s upset-proof event (40.7%). This year is the first time that a team made the Sweet 16 taking more 3’s than 2’s on the season, and there are actually three of those teams (Alabama, Nebraska, and Illinois).

Really, the distribution of 3-point attempt rate among teams remaining doesn’t appear to be any different that pure randomness. Nine teams are above average, seven teams are below average; four teams are in the top quartile, four teams are in the bottom quartile. As always, you can win in a variety of ways.

There are surely better ways to measure strategic variance. (Besides, we are ignoring the defensive end here and the remaining teams skew towards allowing more 3-pointers than average.) But there’s a larger point that needs to be understood. For the best teams, strategies with less variance are useful in winning buy games and against teams in the bottom half of one’s league. But in the tournament, even the best teams have to play better than their season-long numbers to win a title.

Of the last 28 champions, just two have had their adjusted net rating decline in the tournament: 2001 Duke, who went down by a mere 0.24, and 2019 Virginia, who needed a series of miracles to survive their rating dropping by 1.44 points. Having a high floor is nice, but regardless of how high your floor is, if you’re playing to it, you’re not winning a title (unless Kihei Clark throws a miracle pass to Mamadi Diakite for a buzzer-beater to force overtime in an Elite Eight game, Kyle Guy gets fouled on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to win a Final Four game, and DeAndre Hunter hits a late 3 to force overtime in the title game. Why isn’t this wild run talked about more?)

That’s the reason it’s hard to believe that we aren’t in some sort of fluky dry spell for upsets. It’s one thing to know who the best teams are. But to predict the tournament, you still need to know who is going to play better than they have been. Good luck with that. That idea would change if we get teams like 2026 UConn on the women’s side but I doubt we’ll ever get anywhere close to that point.

On that note, I’ll point out that there’s a mere 15% chance that the three remaining one-seeds make it to Indy together. And imagine if Houston and Illinois, the two-best non-one’s per my ratings, weren’t playing each other in a Sweet 16 game in a region without a one-seed. That’s all to say that there’s a decent possibility the narrative changes by Monday.