It’s that time of year again when college basketball gets wild! On March 15, the top sixty-eight teams will be selected for a chance to win it all. Before filling out your bracket and making predictions, there are some important trends you should consider as well as some fun facts to note about the NCAA tournament.
1. The odds of filling out a perfect bracket is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 or about 1 in 9 quintillion. In other words, if you are able to create a perfect bracket, you probably aren’t human.
2. A number 16 seed has never defeated a No. 1 seed. Sports fans are waiting to see the day this happens. We all love an underdog, but you might want to consider putting all No. 1 seeds through the second round. Maybe this could be the year a No. 1 seed falls, as sports fans we can only hope.
3. The safest upset prediction to go with seems to be selecting a 12 seed over a 5 seed. This has happened forty-four times. Last year, three teams accomplished this including Stephen F. Austin, North Dakota State, and Harvard.
4.The last undefeated team to win the tournament was the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers. Last year Wichita State was undefeated but lost in the round of 32. If Kentucky finishes the season with an undefeated record it will be interesting to see if they will be able to win it all.
Alright, now that I’ve mentioned some interesting facts about the tournament, I now want to talk about what it’s going to take for the San Diego State Aztecs to prevail in this year’s tournament.
Depending on how they finish the season, they can hopefully enter the tournament as an 8 or 9 seed. Regardless of what seed they end up entering as, the Aztecs will need to clean up their act if they want any shot at progressing through the tournament. We aren’t the most exciting team on the offensive side of the ball and don’t contain a go-to playmaker that we had last year in Xavier Thames. Where the Aztecs shine is on the defensive side of the ball. We have only allowed an average of 53.5 points per game which ranks our defense in the top five of the NCAA. Arguably the most frustrating nuance when watching the Aztecs this year has been poor free throw shooting. We rank 333 out of 351 teams with a sad .628 percentage of made free throws. It will be nearly impossible to win close games with this many missed opportunities. The recipe for success this year is composed of two facets including, the good old saying, “the best offense is a good defense” and the amount of points we can add to the scoreboard via shots from the line.
Regardless as to what takes place in the tournament every year, March Madness is truly one of the most exciting sports tournaments in the world. If there is one thing I've learned from watching the tournament over the years, it’s to expect the unexpected. Of course, this is the reason we call it “March Madness”.
