NCAA Tournament musings and the five teams that can win it all

Plus: My bracket and a brief eulogy for Virginia

Brace yourself for serious analysis: The most important thing you can do to win your bracket is pick the national champs. My last two really great bracket performances came in 2019 (Virginia) and 2023 (UConn) and you can guess the thread between them. Pick the winner of the whole thing and you don't really have to worry about being accurate about anything else! Life hack! It's just that easy!

OK, fine, so it's not exactly that easy. In both cases, the national champion was an extremely good team that, for various reasons, wasn't considered the obvious pre-tournament favorite. In Virginia’s case, it was the whole "history of egregious NCAA Tournament failure" thing; in UConn's it was a midseason swoon leading to a No. 4 seed that threw the masses just slightly off the scent.

The strategy is the same this year. Fortunately, as in the Virginia case, this year we have an incredibly viable national title contender that just so happens to be marginally disrespected by the public consciousness because of past events that may or may not be predictive of future performance. But before we get to the team that I’m going to pick to win the national title, let’s start with the team that probably will:

Photo credit: Associated Press

UConn

So, yeah. What more, at this point, can one say about UConn? The Huskies are the best team in the country. They’re playing their best basketball in the back half of the season. They run the best offensive stuff in the sport, and some of the best any of us have ever seen, which sounds like a thing a former president would say about them while doing an awkward hand gesture but which I actually literally mean, which they complement with ferocious defense and incredible swagger and a balance only the great teams can dream of. Alex Karaban might be one of the 10 best players in the college game and he’s UConn’s, what, third-best guy? Dan Hurley won a national title, lost his three best players from last year’s team, and immediately built another every bit as good as, if not better than, the one that preceded it. Nuts.

In the immediate wake of selection show, TV pundits raced to pick UConn, and it wasn’t hard to find fans grousing on Twitter about the chalk. But, like, dude: That’s the best team in the country. That team should win the national title. Don’t get mad at the guys in the persistent white-soled dress sneakers for telling you so.

Here are the two specious reasons I have come up with for why UConn might not win the national title in 2024:

• Their region is a gauntlet. As often happens, putting the top team in their preferred geography — in this case in Brooklyn and Boston — ended up putting them in the same region as incredible competition. In this case: a fantastic Auburn team, not to mention potentially one of Illinois (extremely good offense) or Iowa State (extremely good defense), plus a highly tricky matchup with either Boo Buie or an FAU group that went to the Final Four last year, both as early as the second round. This reason might end up dissolving after Friday, when all of the high single-digit seeds lose, or whatever, but odds are UConn is going to face one of the statistically toughest roads to the Final Four.

• Just, like, the universe, man. Math. The infinite. That part in Oppenheimer where Niels Bohr asks Oppenheimer if he can hear the music. The NCAA Tournament is like that! Yes, the numbers, blah blah, but can you really feel the thing? Think about how hard it is to win six NCAA Tournament games in a row. Six. Now double it. Two years, twelve games, no room for error, no mistakes, no alarms, no surprises. It is just an extremely unlikely thing to do, even if you have the best team in the country. If UConn does it they will somehow have done so both in accordance with, and in defiance of, the odds.

Not very convincing.

Houston

Time to revise our season-long theories on Houston, and then revise them again.