NCAA Tournament Performance (by conference)

The first weekend of the NCAA Tournament has come and gone, and unless you had Wisconsin or a dark horse going far, your bracket is still in decent shape. The preservation of the top seeds only amplifies the quality of matchups that will take place this upcoming weekend starting with Thursday night.

The only major upset of the weekend was UNLV eliminating Wisconsin in Chicago. I was surprised when Washington State forgot how to play perimeter defense against Vanderbilt in what turned out to be a double overtime defeat.

There is no perfect way to gauge conference performance, but what we can do is look at expected and actual numbers from the multi-bid conferences. For the record, it’s not completely scientific, but it does work with the seeds designated by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee.

Conference	Actual Record	Expected Record	Actual vs. Expected Difference	Actual Sweet 16 teams	Expected Sweet 16 teams	Sweet 16 Difference
ACC	6-6	9-4	-2.5	1	3	-2
SEC	7-2	5-4	+2.0	3	1	+2
Pac-10	7-3	8-3	-0.5	3	3	0
Big Ten	6-5	5-4	0*	1	2	-1
Big East	5-4	7-4	-1.0	2	2	0
Missouri Valley	2-1	2-1	0	1	1	0
Big XII	5-2	6-1	-1.0	2	3	-1
Mountain West	2-1	2-2	+0.5	1	0	+1
Western Athletic	1-2	1-2	0	0	0	0
Atlantic-10	1-2	0-2	+0.5	0	0	0
Horizon	2-1	1-2	+1.0	1	0	+1
Colonial	1-2	0-2	+0.5	0	0	0

* lower winning percentage for actual record

When staring at these statistics, a few things jump out.

• First, the ACC has done the worst job of “holding” seeds in this tournament. In three games, a member school has lost to a lower seed. In Virginia’s case, many feel that they were generously seeded.

• Second, the SEC (the SEC East, in particular) has been stellar. In my opinion, Tennessee had the good fortune of being in a pod with three overseeded teams. I will never understand an objective argument describing how either Virginia or Long Beach State deserved within one seed line of their given seed. Had Wazzou held onto their double-digit lead against Vanderbilt, we’d be discussing the Pac-10 in this spot.

• Third, … so the Big Ten wasn’t as bad as I thought they were. I stand by my somewhat inflammatory (yet factually based) comments about Illinois. I watched a fair amount during the regular season and preferred to watch the good defensive teams of the Valley instead of the Big Ten save Ohio State and Wisconsin. Like last year, the Big Ten had a lazy Sunday this year.

• Fourth, the end game for the Big East is what we expected after the first weekend – Georgetown and Pittsburgh move on and everyone else going home. What we didn’t expect were all of the close games. While the nation expected VCU to keel over and die after being down 19 in the second half, I was more surprised by the sustained effort of Boston College against Georgetown. The Big East record might have been better had Jerel McNeal and Mike Nardi been healthier, but I don’t believe that a healthy McNeal or Nardi would have altered the number of Big East teams in the Sweet 16.

• Lastly, I, for one, thought a few of the seedings were shrouded in subjectivity. Of course, I can talk for hours about Virginia, who actually played some quality basketball in the tournament - unlike the two weeks leading up to the NCAAs. There’s also UNLV, who we projected as a 4-seed (actual: 7-seed), and then *stunned* Wisconsin. The two that have the committee smiling are Butler and Vanderbilt. Following the method of previous selection committees, many bracketologists placed less value on November victories; however, Butler received a 5-seed, compared to an 8-seed, which was projected by a group of 30 bracketologists. To their defense, they validated the seed and overachieved by defeating a good Old Dominion team (who played a bad game, trust me) and a favored Maryland squad. As for the Commodores, their 5-5 close to the season capped by two non-road defeats to Arkansas had people thinking that they were destined for the doomed 8-seed. As it was, Vanderbilt got a 6-seed, trounced a GW team that was happy to be in the dance and gutted out a thriller against the Cougars.

One thing we do know is that, despite the chatter – mainly by ESPN guys who have more airtime than substantive material to fill it with - there was no George Mason this year. USC (5), Butler (5), Vanderbilt (6), and UNLV (7) are the only non-protected seeds that advanced the round of 16. All in all, this is just one weekend, and much of this story has yet to unfold. That is the beauty of this madness that takes place annually in March and grips us to our sofas for hours on end. By next weekend, 16 will have become 4 and more stories will be etched into our permanent memory. Until the games return in 89 hours, savor the quality of basketball we’ve enjoyed over this past weekend and do your best to resist watching the NIT (that is, unless you have a rooting interest).