Every NCAA tournament leaves behind its share of expected occurrences, surprises that don’t shock, surprises that ambush the brain, and series of events that cut against the grain of the regular season.
In the coming days at The Student Section, we’re going to put this tournament — and the season — in perspective. In separate articles, we’ll focus on players that left a mark, for better or worse. We’ll also focus on coaches — how they performed, and how the new alignment of coaches is reshaping the 2015-2016 season. Arizona State is still looking for a coach at press time, and the Sun Devils’ selection might (or might not) cause the carousel to spin a little more.
For now, though, let’s deal with some team-and-conference issues in the wake of the 2015 NCAA Tournament. Some events in March Madness were conducive to firm and confident appraisals of various teams and their member conferences. Other events cut against the grain. Let’s try to make sense of what happened over the past three weeks.
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The first thing to point out about this NCAA tournament on a broader level is that some teams busted through thresholds.
Duke won it all, but that’s not a wildly improbable or somehow eye-popping event, especially in light of the bracket the Blue Devils received (and earned, just in case you’re bitter about that point).
Michigan State reached the Final Four — WAIT, YOU MEAN TO TELL ME TOM IZZO DID WELL IN MARCH? Again, it’s an impressive feat, but not the sort of thing which needs to be commented on at great length from a broad, national perspective. (In East Lansing or in a Big Ten-specific publication? Sure, it deserves a lot of ink and bandwidth in those outlets.)
In the process of realizing that certain teams crossed thresholds, the foremost example I’m thinking of is Notre Dame, the team that created the biggest splash in this tournament without making the Final Four. One has to realize not just that the Irish hadn’t made the Elite Eight since 1979, but that the Irish had toiled for a decade and a half under Mike Brey without coming particularly close to that stage of the Big Dance. Notre Dame made the Sweet 16 in 2003, traveling to Anaheim for a West Regional semifinal against toop-seeded Arizona. The Wildcats drummed the Irish out of the building, and that’s the last time Notre Dame made the second weekend of the Dance.
This year, the Irish looked like a different team. They were able to win a street fight against street-fight king Butler in the round of 32. They then carved up a formidable defense, the same Wichita State defense that squeezed the life out of Kansas in a 7-versus-2 game that didn’t really feel like an upset in favor of the 7 seed. When the brackets were revealed on Selection Sunday, Wichita State was a popular pick to not only beat Kansas, but take down Notre Dame. The Irish’s performance in that game opened a lot of eyes and indicated that this was not the “same old Notre Dame” that had been soundly beaten in NCAA first weekends during a large portion of the Brey era.
When you also realize that Notre Dame sliced up Duke’s defense TWICE during the regular season — and that the Blue Devils matured so thoroughly on defense in the NCAA tournament — it becomes that much clearer: Notre Dame was better than a lot of people (this one included) gave it credit for during the regular season. I have no problem calling Notre Dame an extremely good (borderline great) team, based on the consistent quality it revealed in March… including its romp to the ACC tournament championship. This is a team that grew up, and by growing up, it showed that the ACC had three top-tier teams this season: Duke, Virginia, and the Irish.
Just to draw a quick contrast — and staying in the ACC — Louisville is very different from Notre Dame. Whereas the Irish repeatedly showed an ability to expose an opposing defense during the season and in the ACC tournament, Louisville’s offense was usually a train wreck. The composed, methodical, clean halfcourt offense unfurled by Louisville against Northern Iowa and North Carolina State (and in the first half of Michigan State before returning to familiarly ragged form in the second half of that game) was entirely out of step with what was seen during the regular season.
Both Notre Dame and Louisville had great runs this March, but Notre Dame was and is the better team. Louisville got hot and put its best foot forward after struggling for much of the campaign. The Irish and Cardinals show how March can either tell you the straight story or weave a web of deception.
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Another team that crossed a threshold? Gonzaga. It might seem hard to believe that it was 16 years ago that the Zags first captured many of our hearts and imaginations by flying to the Elite Eight. The Zags were a “darling” back then, and by making the Sweet 16 in the next two seasons as a double-digit seed, Gonzaga became the poster child for “Cinderella,” affirming that basketball brand in a very powerful and memorable way.
Then, however, a few things happened: Gonzaga attracted better recruits (Adam Morrison) and expanded its recruiting base (as shown by the 2009 team that reached the Sweet 16). The school built a new on-campus arena. It threw resources into the sport, and when you do that, you’re no longer a darling (and everything that term conveys). You’re playing for keeps.
Well, Gonzaga’s record from 2002 through 2014 was not what one would expect from a school that’s playing for keeps… much as Texas no longer felt that merely making the NCAAs every year was acceptable for Rick Barnes. This program needed to find a way to go deeper into the NCAAs, and entering this tournament, few schools were more centrally placed in the pressure cooker than the Zags. No, they didn’t beat Duke — of course, no one else did — but they took care of business, something Gonzaga teams from past seasons largely failed to do. Much like Notre Dame, Gonzaga didn’t make the Final Four, but a first Elite Eight in the Mark Few era should definitely be seen — and aceepted — as a success. This was a postseason worthy of Gonzaga’s efforts to build its program into something bigger.
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On the conference level, the fundamental realization to emerge from the season is that no conference was particularly good — hmmm, smells just like football, doesn’t it?
The ACC — top heavy, but with a lot of mediocre teams in the middle and a few really bad teams at the bottom — was like the 2014 Pac-12 in college football. The Big Ten — with two teams that made strong postseason runs but was not nearly as formidable from the third through seventh positions as it had been in previous seasons — was like the 2014 SEC in football.
The Big 12? Well, it got punched in the gut this postseason… just like 2014.
The fascinating takeaway from the ACC’s season is that the league was shoehorned into the position the SEC so often inhabits in football. The ACC — with quality at the top and a bunch of other teams in the middle that beat each other up — became the conference in which “If Team X from (insert weaker/mid-major conference here) played in the ACC, it would lose six or seven more games.”
In the end, it’s not that different from football: By all means acknowledge that a conference had more good teams at the top, but please don’t insist that top-heaviness is the only way to evaluate a conference, or that it necessarily trumps other versions or measurements of quality. One can note that the Big 12 did not have a single great team this season… but it had more good teams as a percentage of its conference than just about anyone else. A 10-team league has to be evaluated differently from a 14- or 15-team league.
The NCAA tournament’s results can cut in all sorts of directions, but this tournament should not be allowed to completely redefine our sense of what makes a conference:
A) good;
B) better than the others.
If you can keep that point firmly in mind and not lose sight of it, you will have framed the 2015 NCAA Tournament — great for the Big Ten, good for the ACC, and bad for the Big 12 — in a properly-calibrated manner.