Sixteen thoughts on the Sweet Sixteen, part one
A sampling of (basketball-only!) takes ahead of a fascinating second weekend
The first week of the 2026 NCAA Tournament did lots of things at once.
It ended the two most compelling and omnipresent stories of the season: Kentucky’s overemotional mediocrity and Kansas’s Darryn Peterson-dominated roller coaster. It marked, maybe — based on the way he’s been talking, and the way people who hear things have been talking, and we can’t stress this enough: maybe — the final games of Bill Self’s Hall of Fame career. It sealed Hubert Davis’s tenuous North Carolina fate, and thus created a wide open, epochal, first-time-outside-the-family UNC coaching search.
It revealed Ben McCollum’s unique genius to the world. It yielded one of the most unlikely power-conference Sweet Sixteen matchups ever (Iowa-Nebraska). It gave the Big Ten incredible odds of winning its first national title in 26 years. It put the Midwest at the forefront of the sport. It ensured tickets in DC this weekend will cost a fortune. (The Acela will be lit.) It featured the closest, greatest missed buzzer beater in 16 years. It raised questions about why all of the balls are so inflated. It unleashed a horrifying abomination on a bewildered public.
Mostly it produced big, thematic takes. It drove some folks a little crazy. Cinderella is dead! (Probably not.) Upsets will never happen again! (Immediately wrong.) NIL and the portal and conference realignment are evil! (Wrong, wrong, last one’s true.) The system is unfair! (Always has been.) Mid-majors can’t get games! (It depends.) Or actually maybe they can, sort of, like Matt Painter said! (It depends.) Are metrics making the committee too good at seeding the field?! (Ha.) Are smarter tactics making the best teams too good at basketball??? (Never.)
Why isn’t this tournament the exact idealized version of itself I remember from when I was 12? (You’re not 12.)
It’s like this every year, to some extent, particularly among those who don’t watch or talk about college basketball before March 1 and then pile in with half-formed big-picture opinions that feel important but also reveal an utter lack of interest in the actual games themselves. (These are the same people who will ask the same state-of-the-world questions to every coach at Thursday’s Final Four press conferences. Groan.) Still, last weekend felt newly jarring. The complaints were louder than ever. The level of play was higher than ever. The underlying structures were more nuanced than ever. And more people than ever before watched:
Look: These discussions are variably valid. Some are pretty dumb. Some are worth having. Crucially, though: in the offseason. That’s the beauty of caring about this sport all year: You can spend all of the time there is no basketball talking about of the stuff that isn’t basketball. We’ll do it in two weeks. We’ll do it all summer! But when there is basketball — when it’s the NCAA Tournament, when the best teams are this good, when things have been this much fun to watch — the rest of this stuff feels beside the point.
Below, then, is a list of variously sized thoughts about the actual games happening this week, broken down by region, informed by everything that came before. Truly: couldn’t be more excited.
West Region
No. 11 Texas vs. No. 2 Purdue (Thursday, 7:10 pm ET)
No. 4 Arkansas vs. No. 1 Arizona (Thursday, 9:45 pm ET)
1. Could Texas’s defensive rebirth possibly be real?
In 2015, the Duke Blue Devils ranked seventh in the ACC in points allowed per possession. That team was uber-talented, of course, and could always score it, but things got so bad on that end during league play — particularly in back-to-back double-digit losses to NC State and Miami — that Coach K, for quite possibly the first time in his already long and historic career, made Duke (gasp) play zone.
It was a whole thing. It was the big honking wart all season, especially relative to dominant undefeated Kentucky, even as Duke earned a No. 1 seed. And then Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow et al. got into the NCAA Tournament and did this:
The only team break the point-per-trip barrier against the 2015 national champs, or get close, was one of the best offenses of the KenPom era. In the national title game. Which Duke won.
Point being: There is precedent here. Per Bart Torvik, Texas allowed 1.05 ppp and ranked 92nd in the country across the 2025-26 season. In its three NCAA Tournament wins, it has allowed .92 ppp and ranks 12th nationally.
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