🗣️ IT

🗣️ IS

🗣️ MARCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s the time of the year when this stuff happens!

Longtime Rodge-Readers will know that the NCAA basketball tournament is one of my favorite sporting events. Not necessarily because of who goes on to win the championship, but because of the chaos and beauty of what amounts to a 350-team single-elimination tournament featuring teams from every corner of America.

If you’ve been following other sports — like I dunno, say you got REALLY REALLY REALLY into the Winter Olympics — here’s a quick synopsis to get you up to speed.

And btw, if you’re somebody who subscribed to this newsletter for the Olympics or football and really don’t care about this college hoops stuff … here’s where you can turn individual sports newsletters on or off. Just a heads up, there’s gonna be A LOT of college hoops stuff!

– Rodger Sherman

The most important story in college basketball is easy: The 31-0 Miami RedHawks.

Miami completed their entire regular season without losing. That doesn’t happen in men’s college basketball, because there are thirty one games. the first team to make it through the regular season without a loss since Gonzaga in the 2020-21 pandemic season and the first mid-major since Wichita State in 2013-14.

If you haven’t watched our RedHawks in action (MACtion, technically), you’re probably picturing a mid-major juggernaut. They’re blowing out their overmatched competition game after game. They’re the cream of the crop of the best of the rest. Maybe they’ve even got a future NBA player.

Nope! Not our RedHawks! These are the all-time skin-of-their-teeth all-stars. All their nails are bitten. All their barns are burnt. They keep flipping a coin and it has come up “tails” dozens of times in a row. Statisticians are fuming. I think they are physically and spiritually incapable of losing.

They are surviving on an all-dessert diet of buzzer-beaters and overtime wins. Nine of their 31 wins — almost 30 percent! — have come in overtime or in one-possession games.

Here’s a quick rundown of Miami magic:

All in all, the RedHawks have won NINE overtime or one-possession games. According to hoops statistician Evan Miyakawa, the odds of Miami going 31-0 were .0037 percent, or 1-in-3,740. (I’m not sure if he’s using pre-game or post-game win probability but somewhere around the second decimal in the percentage I stopped caring.)

To a rational thinker, his makes Miami’s case for an upset bid very questionable. They’re ranked 91st by Ken Pomeroy, lower than 12-19 Marquette and just ahead of 13-18 Notre Dame. They’re probably not even the best team in the MAC — Akron went 17-1 with a much higher average margin of victory in conference play, and are favored to win the MAC Tournament. (The one, of course: A 3-point loss to the RedHawks which Akron led for 58 percent of the game.) Despite their best efforts to schedule a power conference opponent, they haven’t played a quality team all year long. They’ll probably be 15-ish point underdogs in their first-round game, playing an opponent the likes of which they simply haven’t seen.

But rational thinkers get wrecked in March. You really think the college basketball gods let all those buzzer-beaters drop into the hoop, just for our heroes to get wiped off the face of the bracket by 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoon?

An entire lifetime of writing about college basketball, and I’m still not sure: Do college basketball fans love it when The Team That Always Wins is good again? Or do we hate it? Like, we say we hate it … but we also watch more when those teams are doing well?

We’ll have plenty of time to work through those complicated feelings this year! The Teams That Always Win are winning a lot.

In men’s hoops, Duke is the best team in the country. Gross!

The Blue Devils are 29-2 with two losses by a combined four points, both coming on opposing scores in the final five seconds of those games. (They are vulnerable to Miami Ohio and Miami Ohio only.) Ken Pomeroy’s numbers give the Blue Devils a net rating of +40.62, the highest of any team since 1999. (You guessed it, that was also Duke.)

Like last year, Duke is led by a superstar freshman: Cameron Boozer, the son of Duke legend Carlos Boozer. (Cameron’s shorter fraternal twin, Cayden, comes off the bench for the Blue Devils. Double Booze, a shot and a chaser.) He’s averaging 22.6 points per game, the most by any Duke player since J.J. Redick, and is the favorite to win the Naismith Player of the Year award.

But what’s really unfortunate is that Jon Scheyer, the successor to Mike Krzyzewski, seems to be really good at coaching. Duke lost quite literally all of their starters from last year — freshmen Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel, and Khaman Maluach were all top-10 picks; Sion James and Tyrese Proctor also got drafted. Sure, they’re good this year because Boozer showed up. But outside of that, their rotation is all Duke guys — no new transfers, no freshmen. This Duke team is great not just because they have the best players in the country, but because they’ve retained and developed their depth.

And that might make them better prepared to avoid what happened last year — when Duke was also the best team in the country, but suffered a stunning last-minute collapse in the closing moments of the Final Four against Houston. (Oh yeah — that’s why we like it when the Teams That Always Win are good! In case they lose in dramatic fashion!)

In women’s hoops, UConn is the best team in the country. Gross!

It has been 403 days since UConn’s last loss, an 80-76 loss on the road to Tennessee on February 3rd, 2025. Since then, the Huskies have played 51 games and won all of them, 50 by double-digits. (That includes their 34-point win over UCLA in last year’s Final Four and their 23-point win over South Carolina in the natty.) No Miami (Ohio) situation here: No buzzer-beaters, no overtimes, just blowouts. They’re outscoring their opponents by 38.4 points per game this season, the third-best scoring margin of all time … behind the 2015 Huskies and the 2016 Huskies.

Look at their little bar chart on Sports Reference:

The Huskies currently lead the nation in 2-point field goal percentage, 3-point field goal percentage, steals per game, assists per game, defensive field goal percentage, and points allowed per game. There are some questions about their strength of schedule — the Big East is definitely a weaker conference than the SEC and Big Ten — but they have played and beaten four of the teams in the current top 12 of the AP Poll.

Sarah Strong is … maybe the best player I’ve ever seen???? She’s on the verge of becoming the first player in college or pro basketball history to record a 60-40-90 season (just needs to bump up her free throw percentage a lil bit) and is also leading the team in blocks and steals and second in assists. She’s been comped to Nikola Jokic, but he’s not as dominant on defense as Strong. Like, she might be the best player in the country on both sides of the floor, which is terrifying. But she’s only a sophomore — and UConn also has the best draft-eligible player in the class, Azzi Fudd, and most of the other role players from last year’s championship team.

It very much feels like the dynastic UConn squads of the 2010s have come back. Hope everybody else enjoyed the brief window where they could win!

The stats say maybe!

The vibes say no.

On the men’s side: Advanced stats and betting odds have Duke and Michigan roughly neck-and-neck. Yes, I just said Duke has the highest Kenpom rating in the 21st century … but Michigan is only about a point below them. These two teams just squared off in a rare late-season non-conference game — a scheduling miracle, one of the most watched college hoops games in years! — and while it was close, Duke led for the entire second half.

That said, it’s March Madness and basically anybody can win.

On the women’s side, UCLA just became the first team to go undefeated in Big Ten play since 2015 and beat Iowa by 51 in the league championship game — very UConn-esque! But I really can’t shake that thirty-four point loss in last year’s Final Four.

Remember: It’s March Madness. Only UConn can win.

Let’s do a little Q-and-A:

The probable #1 pick in April is Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, and quite frankly, I do not have enough time and space here to explain his deal. Peterson has been widely criticized for his availability issues. He’s missed a lot of the season with hamstring and ankle injuries as well as illness, but has also checked out of many of the games in which he’s played with cramping injuries, despite a lack of visible cramping symptoms. I tend to come down on the side of “the potential #1 pick shouldn’t be pushing through injury to play in regular season college basketball games, but it’s definitely bewildering.

The probable #2 pick is BYU’s A.J. Dybantsa, who I wrote about last year in my article about The Mormon Money Cannon. Dybantsa is leading the nation in scoring — potentially the first time that a freshman has pulled that off since Trae Young in 2018 — but BYU has really struggled of late, including a 4-9 stretch towards the end of the season.

This is honestly a great tournament for draft-heads. In recent years, NBA talent had been diluted between international pro leagues, the G-League, and various prep-to-pros startups, but thanks to the fact that WE CAN PAY COLLEGE ATHLETES NOW, the best players are all in college. 12 of 14 lottery picks from the latest ESPN mock draft will be in the tournament, with one international player and one player who’s injured (North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson.) Compare that to 2023, when only one of the top 5 picks was a college player!

I went through most of last season without developing a take on the Florida Gators and they won the national title. I honestly can’t remember a national champion with so little hype, before/during/after their title run. They’re a 1-seed again this year and as a favor to Florida fans, I am going to continue not developing a take on them. (Although I am pretty excited for 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux to potentially get some minutes in some early-round blowouts.)

Really, not that big a deal. Charles Bediako played five games for Alabama (three wins, two losses) before he was eventually ruled ineligible. James Nnaji, who never actually played in the NBA or G-League but was drafted, was ruled eligible but was a non-factor for a Baylor team that lost in the first round of the Big 12 tournament. (He played one minute and committed a foul and a turnover.)

Unfortunately, I’m worried we might get more chalk.

In 2023, when 16-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue, 15-seed Princeton made the Sweet 16, and 13-seed Furman knocked off Virginia, there were 75 regular season upsets by non-power conference teams over power conference teams, per ESPN. This year? Just 29.

Predictive metrics also indicate the best teams are better than they usually are. Like I said, Duke is the highest-rated team on Kenpom in 27 years, and Michigan isn’t far behind. That carries throughout the top teams and conferences. The SEC this year is the second-best conference of the last decade, per Ken Pomeroy’s average net ratings, only behind last year’s SEC. Since 2021, the gap between an average team in the top 5 conferences and an average team in the next 5 conferences has grown from 7.1 points to 12.4 points.

I do suspect this has to do with the transfer portal/NIL — after a brief window where nobody was sure what to do, the schools with more money are hammering home their advantage to a greater extent than ever. Bummer, but I’m still glad the players are making money.

Same.

I’m going to make my annual Cinderella picks video on my YouTube channel again — subscribe here to get it as soon as it comes out! — but that’s only going to feature 13/14/15 seeds on the men’s side.

But I’ll let you in one team that’s probably too good to make the cut: The Saint Louis Billikens have everything I’m looking for in a March Madness darling. they’ve got tough-to-match style of play (they’re #4 in offensive possession speed, #2 in 3 point-percentage, and #1 in 2-point shot distance. They’ve got a goofy-looking star with no NBA prospects but whose game is absolutely custom-designed to ruin a 2-seed’s day — that’s Robbie Avila, the bespectacled big man with the silky jumper who people were calling Cream Abdul-Jabbar a few years ago. And they’ve got one of the world’s most … unique mascots in the Billiken.

I will not be posting an image of the Billiken, because I respect my readers. I will, however, be dropping a link to an image of the horrifying Billiken. I hate and fear him.

I don’t trust any individual bracketologist — I plug my brain directly into The Bracket Matrix, which mashes all the bracketologists together.

No such resource exists for the women’s tournament — I look at HerHoopStats.

I’ve cited KenPom in here; for women’s stats I tend to look at BartTorvik, whose site has men’s and women’s ratings.

Just a heads up of my schedule around here:

On Selection Sunday, I’ll be doing a guide to the 23-ish teams that won their mid-major men’s conference tournaments to earn automatic bids to the NCAA Tournament . That’ll come out in the afternoon and you’ll be able to look at it as you fill out your bracket.

On Tuesday, I’ll be releasing my official upset picks. There’ll be three men’s teams (13/14/15 seeds) and one women’s team (probably a 12 seed.) Again, here’s the YouTube channel — please subscribe!

And then, the day after every NCAA Tournament, I’ll be writing a newsletter. Again, remember: If you don’t want my college basketball newsletters, here’s where you can turn individual sports on or off.