Yesterday’s sixteen first round March Madness games suggest that we may be in for a repeat of last year’s chalk run, which gave us two #1 seeds and two #2s in the Final Four. In 2007, there were but five upsets in the first two days, with three nine seeds (Purdue, Michigan State and Xavier) and two eleven seeds (VCU and Winthrop) coming out on top. Once Winthrop decided not to play defense on Duke’s final possession yesterday, the biggest surprise was Kansas State over USC (which, given that K-State was near the top of the Big 12 all year wasn’t much of an upset). All the talk over the last few years has been the Rise of the Mid-Majors, with debate over whether to exclude second-tier ACC teams to let in a second or third team from the WCC or Missouri Valley. So what happened? Have the smaller conferences gotten worse, or was it all a charade in the first place?
I looked at all of the first weekend games over the last 10 tourneys, and it appears that the sense that the smaller conferences are on the rise may be more myth than reality:
| Conference | W-L | Pct |
| Big 6* | 365-197 | 0.649 |
| Big 6 + A-10 and C-USA | 399-240 | 0.624 |
| Everyone Else | 81-240 | 0.252 |
* Big 6 includes the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, Pac 10 and SEC. Teams are assigned to the conference they are in currently (i.e. Louisville’s record goes in the Big East for all years).
There have been 480 winners over those 10 years (32 in the first round and 16 in the second each year). 83% have come from the eight power conferences, and 76% from the six BCS conferences. Ah, but certainly the big upsets have come from the little guys, right? Not really. Since the NCAA began seeding all teams, there have been 299 victories by teams seeded 9 or higher (299-841 in all games, for a winning percentage of 26%). The eight largest conferences are 151-269, while the remaining 24 are but 148-572.
The number of non-major conference victories in the first two rounds hasn’t changed all that much over the years, either:
There have always been a few victories, usually from the WCC, Colonial, Horizon or MVC. But even in 2006, a year that eventually saw George Mason go all the way to the Final Four, 75% of the victories came from the big boys. The question isn’t who will be this year’s Cinderella. It’s whether the basketball version of the glass slipper wearer is any more real than the Disney one (with all that said, watch out for the #10 seeds today).
In 1988, the KU football team went 1-10 in Coach Glen Mason’s first year. That campaign featured losses of 56-7 to Auburn, 63-10 to Nebraska, 63-14 to Oklahoma State and 55-17 to Missouri. Overall, the team was outscored 496-189. That year, of course, the basketball team finished 27-11 in Larry Brown’s final season, defeating Oklahoma 83-79 at Kemper Arena to win the national championship. The 1988 Jayhawks held both Nebraska and Oklahoma State to fewer points in basketball than in football.