With few upsets and even fewer close games, this March is lacking madness

Washington Post

24-03-2025

The national brain, long since spoiled with the Lilliputian magic of Cleveland State and Richmond and Valparaiso and George Mason and Stephen Curry and Ohio and Florida Gulf Coast and Saint Peter's, and with the goose-bumpy finishes therein and beyond, has spent the 2025 edition of men's March Madness suffering from a deficit of madness. Cup your ear and hear the moaning, the whingeing and the minor-key sounds of entitlement. Scroll past several fresh appearances of the hackneyed word 'meh.' What dopamine derailment.
Several factors have conspired for a tournament of tepidity. For the first time, here's a Sweet 16 wherein everybody hails from a major conference and nobody from a mid-major or a far-from-major. This tournament became the sixth since the seeding structure began in 1985, and the first since 2017, in which the teams seeded No. 13 through No. 16 went 0-16. For the 12th time, there's only one double-digit seed in the closing 16 — there were none in 1995 and 2007, just as there were five in 1999 and four in 2011, 2021 and 2022 — and that double digit would be No. 10 Arkansas, a storied program whose six Final Four berths include a national title under the great Nolan Richardson. The last 16 lack any magical little name that makes people wonder as to its location, unless there's somebody left out there who'll say, 'Hey, where's Duke, anyway?' Even a nation lousy at geography would seem able to achieve a reasonable pegging of location of Auburn.
Some past tournaments have gone chalk-prone — the Sweet 16 seedings in both 2009 and 2019 added up to a meager 49 — but few have gone both chalk-prone and rout-prone (although 2009 comes to mind). The 2019 event, for one, loaded up with early-round gasps such as Duke-UCF, Maryland-LSU, Tennessee-Iowa and the curious struggle of Kentucky-Wofford. This Madness started off with a buffet of routs, lacking any buzzer-beater until a Mr. Derik Queen from Baltimore supplied one, and the nation responded by arguing over whether he traveled. How quaint.
The four No. 16 seeds, given hope by recent-years acronyms such as UMBC (2018) and FDU (2023), lost by a combined 128 points. No. 15 seed Robert Morris stuck admirably with Alabama — every tournament can use a surging Robert Morris — and hinted at the kind of outrageous madness the American brain has come to require, but its 65-64 lead with seven minutes left bled into an 81-71 deficit with two and then a 90-81 loss by closing. McNeese State charmed and educated with its tale of a leaving coach exulting before leaving after an upset of Clemson, but even as basketball minds maintain that the difference in basketball caliber between lower seeds and high seeds has continued to narrow, Purdue and McNeese on the court together made Purdue look like the resident of a higher plane.
Tournaments through the years sometimes do lack for moments that lurk in memory banks, but in this one, precious few games have featured any airborne ball that carries the fates of many while the clock carries itself toward 0:00. The University of California at San Diego, where it's a wonder anyone can get anything accomplished given the understandable urge to stand around gazing at La Jolla, had its Tritons in the tournament, their story a fine stunner in a first year of eligibility. They took their 41-27 halftime deficit to Michigan and wrung a 65-63 lead with 2:29 remaining, then had a three-point shot with four seconds left to tie. They lost, 68-65, and the country hardly got to know and envy them. Call it an emblem of March 2025 thus far.
A season known as top-heavy, with statistics that showed it as top-heavy, has nodded toward a tournament gone top-heavy. The Big Ten at one point stood 10-0 in games and stands 12-4 with a quarter of the 16 lingerers. The Big 12 went 6-1 in the first round (with Kansas its lone fallen) and 10-3 in the first two and hogs another quarter. The SEC spent the year regarded as predominant, then got a record 14 tournament bids as a belief in its predominance, and now has landed half those teams in the 16 as a validation of that predominance. Calling to mind 2011, when Connecticut finished ninth in the Big East and then won the national championship, the SEC has taken its sharpened iron and has hurled a team in a four-way tie for ninth place at 8-10 into the 16. You know your tournament has gone chalk-prone when the upstart figure is John Calipari, participant in six previous Final Fours at three previous schools with three previous closing-Monday-night appearances and one previous national title.
Calipari weathered one hell of a tussle in Providence on Saturday afternoon — opposite Rick Pitino, who once recommended Calipari for the Massachusetts job — a game that might just last in memory even if its closing minutes rang with clangs. The wrestling match had so much effort and so much struggle that it looked not completely unlike Picasso's 'Guernica' even if none dare call it a masterpiece. 'I just saw we went 2 for 19 from three and won?' Calipari said. 'What in the world? Then I saw they were 2 for 22. Was it an ugly game? Or was it a game that was exciting? Like, both? An ugly exciting game. You know, I don't care. It could be an ugly-ugly game and I'm happy we're moving on.'
It's not an ugly-ugly tournament, but its first weekend, generally its best weekend, finished on the tamer side of mad, so now it must rely on promising Sweet 16 matches like BYU-Alabama and Florida-Maryland to keep up with its ballyhooed brethren of bygone years. Could it replicate 2008, when all four No. 1 seeds reached a Final Four, also in San Antonio? It could, even as Houston had to grapple with Gonzaga this past Saturday night and Florida breathed through a mighty struggle come Sunday with Connecticut, which is gone after two seasons of bracket dominance about as close to perfect as it gets. There will come a new champion two weeks hence, and that champion will come from an athletic mansion of a program that beat out other athletic mansions.