NCAA Tournament Reaction: The Biggest Winner, Loser, Snub and Dark Horse

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a bracket!

One of the best times of year is upon us, and Selection Sunday gave sports fans and bracket heads no shortage of material to talk about. Let’s break down some early takeaways from this year’s NCAA Tournament by naming one big winner and loser among the No. 1 seeds, followed by the worst snub and a dark horse that could make the Sweet 16.

Winner: Duke

Maybe Cooper Flagg can get away with resting his sprained ankle for another week. By playing in the East Region, the Blue Devils have the easiest path on paper—easier than No. 1 overall seed Auburn. KenPom.com gives them the best odds of reaching the Elite Eight (69.4%), the Final Four (52.5%), the title game (35.6%) and the championship itself (22.9%).

After opening against a play-in winner, Duke will get Mississippi State or Baylor in the second round, two teams that sharply fell off in the back half of the season. I’m not worried about a fourth-seeded Arizona that lost six of its last 11 and relies on one of the streakiest players in the sport in Caleb Love. Did I mention Duke gets a pair of veritable home games in Raleigh for the first weekend?

Loser: Houston

I’ve sung the Cougars’ praises all year, and Kelvin Sampson’s outfit has owned the Big 12 for the two years it’s been a member. But unlike in the East, the Midwest Region has the most dangerous combo of teams in the 8-9 game: Gonzaga and Georgia. Gonzaga had a quiet season by its standards but still carries the No. 2 offense in the country, while Georgia has knocked off St. John’s, Kentucky and Florida this year.

Get past that round, and Houston is likely staring down Purdue or Clemson, two no-nonsense programs that made the title game and the Elite Eight last year, respectively, with much of their cores back for another go-round. Houston has plenty of work to do to prove it won’t crash out early in the second weekend, as it did each of the past two years.

Snub: West Virginia

The most egregious snub from the field is also the only obvious one this year. I think the committee got 67 of 68 teams correct, including leaving out wounded Indiana at the end of the day.

But on Bracket Matrix, which aggregates and scores dozens of professional and amateur bracketologists, 111 out of 111 brackets projected West Virginia as in the field before the Selection Show. This was a team with six Quadrant 1 wins (versus North Carolina’s one), high-quality victories against Gonzaga, Iowa State and Kansas, decent metrics and no bad losses. This wasn’t supposed to be a bubble team.

Worse, the committee chair’s explanation sounded like excuse-making. “They had a really good year overall, but since (Tucker DeVries) was hurt they did go 13-11—and when they beat Iowa State, Iowa State was short-handed as well,” Bubba Cunningham said. Frankly, the Mountaineers can’t control whether their opponent is fully healthy—and Javon Small, not DeVries, was their best player.

Dark horse: Yale

None of the 10 or 11 seeds scream out to me as great Sweet 16 picks, but down here at the No. 13 seed in the South Region, we have a tantalizing one.

Yale toppled Auburn in a 4-13 game last March, and despite losing 7-footer Danny Wolf to the transfer portal, the Bulldogs were even better this season, with the eighth-best 3-point percentage in Division I (38.8%). They’ve won 16 of their last 17 games, boat-raced the Ivy League and drew Texas A&M in the first round. Here’s the open secret about the Aggies: They often forget how to score points and own the worst field goal percentage in the SEC.

Should Yale pull off one upset, its second-round opponent very well could be No. 5 Michigan—where Wolf now plays. I’d love to see that. The Wolverines just won the Big Ten Tournament, yet they’ve constantly outperformed their underlying metrics, a string of luck that feels bound to end early in the tournament.