Madness Is Mostly Missing This March — For Now
Rounds 1-2 of the 2025 NCAA men's tournament were mainly duds, but it should set up an epic Sweet 16... and beyond.
I will fully admit that we’ve been spoiled by March Madness over the years. As someone who has faint memories of Tate George and grew up on grainy footage of Lorenzo Charles, subsequent NCAA tourneys have added so many buzzer-beaters, stunning upsets and crazy comebacks to the canon that we now act like we’re being shortchanged if there isn’t a Rip Hamilton or Bryce Drew-level moment every day of the first few rounds.
So when the 2025 men’s tourney featured a relative paucity of upsets and exciting finishes through the first weekend, it felt disappointing — even though our brains know how unrealistic it is to expect Ali Farokhmanesh every game.
Still, this March has been notable for its lack of signature Madness, with a few exceptions.
For the second straight year, all four No. 1 seeds are still active in the Sweet 16 — Duke, Auburn, Houston and Florida have a combined 76.3 percent chance of winning the title, in fact, according to my my 🏀 2025 NCAA Tournament Forecast 📊 — as are 12 of the tourney’s 16 top-4 seeds, with only one team seeded worse than sixth continuing its journey.
(And that team, No. 10 seed Arkansas, is no Cinderella. It is coached by John Calipari, and ranked 16th in the preseason AP poll before slumping most of the regular season and only pulling things out of the fire in the weeks immediately before Selection Sunday. They are the classic power-conference underachiever who gets their act together in the tourney between improved health and cohesion, but far from a plucky underdog story.)
This year marks just the seventh time in the 64-team main bracket era (since 1985) that 15 of the 16 teams advancing to the tournament’s second weekend were seeded among the top 6, and just the fifth time that 12 of 16 were top-4 seeds. The average seed of teams remaining in the Sweet 16, 3.44, is also seventh-lowest in the 64-team era.
And, as is fitting for a season that we’ve described as “top-heavy” all year, the average Simple Rating System (SRS) score for the surviving teams of the Sweet 16 (+23.3) is easily the highest in any men’s tourney since 1985, beating out 2019 (+21.6).
All of that would be one thing if the games themselves were actually exciting. And there have been a few thrilling finishes, especially this past weekend (and on Sunday in particular). Maryland vs. Colorado State was an instant classic, with multiple go-ahead shots in the closing seconds — including an amazing buzzer-beating game-winner by Terps freshman sensation Derik Queen:
Other favorites did feel the heat at times, such as Florida trailing UConn with 4 minutes left to play and Houston needing to hold off a furious Gonzaga comeback bid. But the average game of Rounds 1-2 in the 2025 men’s tournament was decided by 14.0 points per game, the seventh-widest average PPG margin for early winners in any tournament since 1985. Only three tournaments in history — 2019, last season (2024) and now 2025 — have featured an average winner’s margin of at least 14 PPG and advanced teams with an average SRS of at least +20.0.
The combination of favorites winning, by relatively lopsided margins, has launched many complaints about a boring, chalky tournament. But the silver lining is that the Sweet 16 — and subsequent rounds — should be extremely competitive as a result.
While there’s a sizable chance that at least one of top-seeded Duke, Auburn, Houston or Florida eventually cuts down the nets at the Alamodome in San Antonio, the odds that they make up the entire Final Four are just around 9 percent. Each favorite will need to go through multiple highly rated teams to make the Final Four — and then either face each other, or most likely another talented high seed who just knocked off a top team. Only two previous Sweet 16s (1989, 2019) have seen double-digit teams with an SRS of +20 or better advance this far in the tournament, and this year’s haul of 13 teams with a +20 SRS or better is an all-time record.
In other words, there has arguably never been a better or deeper Sweet 16 field on the men’s side than the group we have here in 2025. Regrettably, we had to sacrifice some classic early-round March Madness to get there, but here’s hoping the quality of basketball over the next few weekends will make it all worthwhile.
Correction (March 24, 6:31 a.m.): The email version of this story originally miscalculated the odds of the Final Four being all No. 1 seeds. Those odds are 9.4 percent, not 3.7 percent.
Filed under: College Basketball