The Living Room Times

One of the greatest annual subplots of the NCAA Tournament in its 64-team (and 65-team) format, IMHO, is the question of whether a #16 seed will finally do the unthinkable and knock off a #1 seed. It’s never, EVER happened, and it rarely even threatens to happen, for the simple reason that #16 seeds — the champions, often the unexpected champions, of America’s worst Division I conferences — are generally just way, way, way worse than almost every other team in the tournament. Their RPIs are in the upper 100s, or even the 200s, meaning they’re literally in the bottom half of Division I. Most of ’em would probably be double-digit underdogs to a #13 or #14 seed, let alone a #1. They’d also be big underdogs to virtually every team in the NIT or CBI.

But every once in a while, a #16 makes a serious run at a #1 — think Albany against UConn a few years back, Western Carolina against Purdue in 1996, or most memorably, Princeton against Georgetown in 1989 — and the entire nation is instantly captivated. Is this the year? Is this the game? Is it really going to happen, finally? If it did happen, it would instantly become the greatest upset in college basketball history, almost by definition.

But it never does happen, not quite — not yet. (It happened in the women’s tournament in 1998, when #16 Harvard beat a #1-seeded Stanford team that was devastated by injury. But never on the men’s side.) Every year, though, there’s that hope, that ever-so-slight chance, that maybe, hopefully, finally, we’ll see the upset to end all upsets, the One Shining Moment to end all One Shining Moments, the seminal triumph of the ultimate underdog. And surely we can all agree that, however unlikely it is on paper, someday, if the NCAA Tournament continues in its current format, someday it will happen.

If the NCAA Tournament continues in its current format. Once upon a time, that seemed like a given — why would anyone mess with the greatest event in sports? Okay, maybe they’d expand it to 68 teams, the fools, which would decrease somewhat the chances of a 16-over-1 upset by forcing all of the #16-seeded Davids to endure “play-in games” before taking on Goliath two or three days later. On the other hand, such a change would also result in some higher quality teams on the #16 seed line — three teams that would otherwise have been #15s would become #16s — so that might actually improve the chances in a few cases. In any event, while perhaps somewhat less likely, a meaningful, glorious end to the #16-over-1 taboo would still be possible.

But if the tournament expands to 96 teams? Fuggedaboutit. Oh, a #16 seed would win, probably sooner rather than later. But it’d be a team like Virginia Tech or UTEP or Northwestern or Kent State — either a mediocre-to-poor major conference team, or a team near the top of a reasonably good mid-major conference. Not a Jacksonville, Stony Brook, Robert Morris, Lehigh or Jackson State — the current Lunardi-projected #16s for this year’s tourney, with RPIs #126, #157, #171, #174 and #248, respectively (and that’s before any conference-tournament upsets).

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