Sheldon H. Jacobson: Why has this year’s men’s basketball tournament been so mad?

The Final Four is set, with San Diego State (No. 5 seed out of the Mountain West), Florida Atlantic (No. 9 seed out of Conference USA), Connecticut (No. 4 seed out of the Big East) and Miami (No. 5 seed out of the Atlantic Coast Conference) ready to battle for the national championship April 1 and 3.

Back in November, no one could have foreseen such an unlikely group. Only San Diego State was listed in the Associated Press Preseason Top 25, coming in at 19. Connecticut and Miami were 27 and 28, respectively, while Florida Atlantic did not reason a single vote.

Blue blood programs like Kansas (they lost as a No. 1 seed in the Round of 32), Kentucky (they lost as a No. 6 seed in the Round of 32) and North Carolina (they did not even make the tournament) are nowhere to be seen. All four No. 1 seeds did not even make the Elite Eight, something that never occurred since the NCAA went to its current format in 1985.

One No. 1 seed, Purdue, even made history by losing in the Round of 64 to a team that was in the First Four. On the other extreme, just two of the 12 teams seeded No. 10, 11, and 12 reached the Round of 32, the lowest number since 2007.

So how extreme is this year’s Final Four?

The sum of the four seeds is 23, the second highest number since 1985, with 2011 having a sum of 26 (seeds 3,4,8, and 11).

With no teams seeded 1, 2 or 3, this has never occurred since 1985, with the odds against it occurring 170 to 1, in line with the odds of a No. 15 seed making the Final Four. There has only been two years (2006 and 2011) when a No. 1 seed did not reach the Final Four.

So what can explain such an extreme year?

Perhaps a disruptive year was long overdue. In each of the past seven tournaments, three teams seeded 1, 2 or 3 have made the Final Four. The top seeded teams have dominated the tournament for decades, with teams seeded 1,2 or 3 winning the national championship 33 out of the past 37 tournaments, something that is guaranteed to not occur this year.

Two major changes impacting the tournament’s post-covid era has been the transfer portal and NIL.

With 1,649 Division I players entering the portal in 2022, rosters have been torn apart and rebuilt. Power conference teams have both gained and lost players. Those gained are players seeking to upgrade from a mid-major to a high-major, or looking for more playing time. Those lost are role players seeking a more prominent role on a team. The net effect has been roster shuffling that made it more difficult for coaches to achieve performance consistency.

Though all four Final Four teams have had incoming transfers, their core players have been on the roster for more than one year. All five leading scorers for Florida Atlantic have been on the team for two or more years, with four of them brought in as freshmen. Connecticut has also enjoyed a somewhat stable roster. Both Miami and San Diego State have had some roster churn, but still possess core players that provide consistency and experience.

With so many rosters being remade every year, seeding teams using the entire season of games can be misleading. As teams acclimate to so many new players, weighting an early December game the same as a late February game may not be representative of team performance in March. This means that the Selection Committee may need to rethink how they seed teams, based not only on wins and losses, but when those wins and losses occurred.

The other distraction is the revenue players are earning from NIL contracts. There is no way to assess how this has affected team performance. However, players now earning a salary simply by being a college athlete creates added responsibilities that may have unintended consequences.

What is certain is that three of the four Final Four teams have never won a national championship, and conferences that have never gone this far in the tournament are enjoying their time to bask in the national spotlight. This demonstrates that no matter why, parity reigns supreme in college basketball, which can only draw more interest to college basketball not just this week, and in the future as well.

Sheldon H. Jacobson is a computer science professor at the University of Illinois.