First Two Rounds of March Madness

First Two Rounds of March Madness

Per usual, this March Madness has been just completely unpredictable. Although there are crazy upsets and awesome games every year, this year just feels different with corona and all the hype because it is the first exciting sports event that we’ve had besides the Super Bowl. March Madness never fails to excite. I mean the first game of the tournament featured 7 Florida versus 10 Virginia Tech and we saw Virginia Tech take it to overtime with a buzzer beater 3 at the end of regulation. We’ve seen some crazy upsets and I’m going to go through all of them based on seeding.

To start off, the only 15 seed to beat their two seed opponent was freaking Oral Roberts versus Ohio State. This game just baffled me. To be fair, I had Ohio State in my championship game, but how on earth do you lose this game if you are Ohio State. Basketball at the end of the day is a lot of other things besides simply talent and if you have to go into every game the same no matter what team you’re playing. It looked like to me that Ohio State thought they had a freebie game and was just going to coast through. This quickly backfired as Oral took the first seven points of the game and Ohio State could not make a shot after that. Oral just had more power at the end of the day and Ohio State choked. They went on to win their next game against 7 seed Florida which is just insane and are on to the sweet sixteen as a heavy underdog against 3 seed Arkansas.

Next we have the 3 seeds. To be honest, all of these games were close throughout. Colgate put pressure on Arkansas with the lead through the first half and Kansas struggled with E Washington. Texas also was put under a lot of pressure by Abil Christian in another shocker and ended up losing the game. West Virginia, however pretty much was able to coast a bit. Back to the Texas game, I do believe Texas did not have the lineup or wins to deserve a 3 seed, but to be fair Abil Christian had a pretty stellar game. They controlled the rebounds and just played well. Kansas got absolutely crushed by USC and deserved to lose their spot in the sweet sixteen. Arkansas won their next but this cannot be said about West Virginia as they lost to Syracuse who also is a great team as an 11 seed.

On to the 4 seeds. 13 seeds were 50% on their games against the 4 seeds. The two games they won was Ohio vs. UVA and North Texas vs. Purdue. It is no surprise to anyone that UVA lost their game as we have seen far worse in their March Madness history. Not to mention them losing against a SIXTEEN SEED as a one seed a few years ago. Ohio has a pretty notable team this year also. The shocker, however was the Purdue game. I don’t think anyone saw this coming. Purdue is very talented this year and honestly this game is more surprising to me than any of the other first round upsets. Oklahoma State made it through the first round but got dominated by 12 seed Oregon State in their next.

One last quick note is the Illinois upset. Sister Jean has power over us all and I think it was her alone that took Loyola-Chicago through the first two rounds and their huge upset over 1 seed Illinois. It is a well deserved first one seed loss as Illinois is also a pretty overrated 1 seed in my opinion.