Do you remember how ridiculously dominant Uconn was last year?
When Huskies rolled away 30 straight points against Illinois in Elite eight?
When they defended their title by winning each NCAA tournament game with at least 14 points?
When Uconn coach Danny Hurley revealed his wife, Andrea, hand washing his happy dragon lingerie between Huskie’s play every NCAA weekend as part of some kind of horrible superstition?
Okay, let’s all be shredded together and forget that we have ever read the last sentence.
Well … what happens if we told you there will be four UCONN-style Behemoths in this year’s NCAA tournament? We can have a final Four in San Antonio where it will look like Mothra vs. Godzilla against Rodan against King Kong – all the noise for immortality in the shadows of Alamo.
Here is what we mean: On the selection Sunday last year, Uconn was the obvious No. 1 team in the country, according to the polls and, even more important, Ken Pomeroy’s algorithm. The Huskies entered the NCAA tournament with an adjusted efficiency margin of +32.21.
(This is important because when you fill in your brackets and try to decide which team will win a particular game, you can look at the two teams ‘efficiency margins to determine how much a team will win. In a related note, the country’s largest online sports books’ scores tend to look very close to these Kenpom differents.)
Anyway, here we suggest that there are four Ucons to enjoy in March.
When you entered Saturday’s conference tournament game, No. 1 Duke boasted an efficiency margin of +38.09. The other ranked Auburn sat at +35.57. Houston, who is demanding a seed no. 1 for the third year in a row, checked in at +35.40. And Florida, who won nine last month at Auburn, owned a +34.90 European Championship.
In other words, all four of these teams go into selection Sunday and see more Dominant than Uconn last year.
Now we tell you too must Choose one of these teams to win everything on your console? Not necessarily. Each monster has an Achilles heel.
Duke, for example, has three beginners who are expected to be lottery picks in the next NBA draft. But Cooper Flag, the likely college player of the year and the definitive No. 1 choice in the draft, injured its ankle Thursday afternoon and sat down the rest of the ACC tournament.
It gives him at least 168 hours of rehabilitation around the clock to be ready for Duke’s NCAA opener, but what happens if he is only 80%? Is it enough for Blue Devils?
Auburn has in the meantime been the country’s No. 1 team most of the year. But the tigers enter NCAAS with losses in three of their last four matches – and memories from being stunned by Yale in the first round last year.
Houston has all toughness, defense and recovery of Kelvin Sampson’s best team-Men Cougars also shoots 40% on 3-points. It is the best in the tournament area. So what are Houston’s potential cases? Only Drake plays at a slower pace. Fewer possessions mean a better chance of an upset (think Villanova’s NCAA title game from Patrick Ewing and Georgetown) in 1985).
Then there is Florida. Gators do everything at the elite level – besides shooting free throw. In their four losses with regular season, they converted only 75 out of 114 freebies. That’s 65.8%.
It does not matter when you walk 18 out of 29 on the line on a random Tuesday night in Athens, Georgia, but it can’t happen under, say, a Sweet 16 game on Thursday evening in San Francisco.
But having these Mars Madness monsters – and thinking about everything they can destroy and what can be their downfall – is what makes this time of year so wonderful.
Just keep the heck away from dirty lingerie, no matter how happy it may seem.
