{"id":817900,"date":"2026-03-17T22:08:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T22:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/817900\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T22:08:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T22:08:22","slug":"march-madness-underdogs-still-matter-plus-the-main-bracket-picking-tip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/817900\/","title":{"rendered":"March Madness underdogs still matter, plus the main bracket-picking tip"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Until Saturday Newsletter \ud83c\udfc8\u00a0| This is The Athletic\u2019s college football newsletter. Sign up here<\/a> to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox.<\/p>\n

First, RIP to\u00a0former Syracuse quarterback Rex Culpepper<\/a>. In 2018, he threw a touchdown in his team\u2019s spring game despite being in the middle of cancer treatment. He passed away after a dirt biking accident at age 28.<\/p>\n

This Is March: Loving underdogs, whether they win or lose<\/p>\n

March has always been the time of year when we get to learn trivia about schools we\u2019d never heard of before. We fixate on weirdly shaped two-stars who leave blueblood heads spinning for no explicable reason. The first week of the NCAA Tournament showcases the conferences that never get showcased.<\/p>\n

\"NCAA
\n \"NCAA<\/p>\n

BEAT OUR EXPERTS<\/p>\n

Predict how you think the tournament will
play out. Can you beat one of our experts?<\/p>\n

But last year produced one of the chalkiest men\u2019s brackets ever,\u00a0with the closest thing to a Sweet 16 Cinderella being \u2026 No. 10 Arkansas, an SEC team coached by John Calipari.<\/p>\n

Was that by-the-book bracket just a fluke?\u00a0After all, we\u2019d seen top-heavy tourneys before the transfer-portal era (2008, 1993, etc.). Three times in the 2020s, a No. 15 seed has made the Sweet 16. FAU-San Diego State was a 2023 Final Four game!
\nOr was it\u00a0a sign of the times<\/a>?\u00a0Across college sports, it\u2019s getting harder for small programs to compete at a high level. Financial disparity means they\u00a0rarely get to keep their breakout players<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maybe both. Either way, endless dominance by big money isn\u2019t something to celebrate,\u00a0and not just because upsets are fun (as long as they don\u2019t happen to you). Everyone invested in college sports should be thinking about how to preserve widespread competition, not erase it.<\/p>\n

Ordinarily, I wouldn\u2019t pay attention to things said by former Auburn coach and scandal aficionado Bruce Pearl. Weeks ago,\u00a0when he lobbied for<\/a>\u00a0a then-undefeated Miami (Ohio) to be snubbed in favor of the .500-ish team he\u2019d handed to his son, it should\u2019ve been forgettable bluster.<\/p>\n

Except\u00a0CBS then made him the main character<\/a>\u00a0of Selection Sunday, college sports\u2019 most monocultural moment. Same role as the one now played each December by Kirk Herbstreit,\u00a0the most prominent of the many gripers<\/a>\u00a0about G5 teams making the College Football Playoff.<\/p>\n

In short, the best thing about college basketball is becoming like one of the worst things about college football,\u00a0where fans of way too many FBS schools\u00a0have long felt unwanted<\/a>. Do we really need all of college sports becoming as snobby as BCS-era football?<\/p>\n

But enough of that. You know what? We\u2019re gonna have some fun anyway.\u00a0College of Charleston is in its first women\u2019s tourney. Same for the California Baptist and Queens men. That rocks, just as much as it ever did.<\/p>\n

For more on the little teams, I asked our\u00a0Sabreena Merchant<\/a>, who covers women\u2019s hoops, and\u00a0Brendan Marks<\/a>, who covers the men\u2019s side, for\u00a0the minimally heralded teams everyone should know about:<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcac Sabreena:\u00a0\u201cNo. 11 Fairfield doesn\u2019t use traditional positional designations on its roster. The Stags have guards and road runners. Basically, they realized they wouldn\u2019t able to recruit traditional bigs at a mid-major and decided to reclassify the forward\/frontcourt group as disruptors who would stretch the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcac\u00a0Brendan:\u00a0\u201cI am fascinated by No. 14 Kennesaw State, which is without leading scorer Simeon Cottle \u2026 because he was federally indicted in January as part of a\u00a0widespread FBI investigation<\/a>\u00a0into corruption and point-shaving. Yet the Owls won 10 of their 17 games without him to go dancing for the second time in school history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did I ask Brendan to pick my alma mater? I did not. The Owls are just that fascinating.<\/p>\n

One additional piece of context for this year:\u00a0Chaotic men\u2019s conference tourneys meant 10 of the bracket\u2019s mid-major reps weren\u2019t the best teams from their leagues, per\u00a0Kenpom<\/a>\u00a0ratings. If and likely when a bunch of them get wiped out by powers, it might not say all that much about the state of the world.<\/p>\n

More ways to pick March rooting interests:<\/p>\n

Quick Snaps<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude2e\u200d\ud83d\udca8 This is usually the part of the newsletter where I sprint through a bunch of college football headlines. Since it\u2019s tourney time, there\u2019s only one headline in here today.\u00a0So let\u2019s take our time building up to it. Obviously, back we go to 1894.<\/p>\n

Starting that August, Amos Alonzo Stagg\u2019s University of Chicago Maroons played 17 home games, hosting five fellow members of the eventual Big Ten and the kinds of oddities you see on old schedules, \u201cChicago Dining Club\u201d and so forth. They also traveled 20 entire miles to play Northwestern.
\nSomehow craving more football, they went to play Stanford on Christmas and again four days later, squeezing in things like a Jan. 4 game against Salt Lake City\u2019s YMCA on the way back. (Stagg\u2019s previous job: YMCA instructor.)<\/p>\n

The Maroons\u00a0went 14-7-1<\/a>. In games against peer-like teams, they went 5-4-1. Yes, that means they lost to non-peers. That\u2019s what happens when you play 22 games in 18 weeks during the time when everyone was allowed to punch faces.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I bring that up because Louisiana Tech is currently\u00a0scheduled to play 20 games<\/a>\u00a0this season,\u00a0thanks to the ongoing legal dispute about when it can leave Conference USA for the Sun Belt.<\/p>\n

Cram Session: One bracket-picking rule<\/p>\n

You probably have tourney picks to finish. I haven\u2019t even started mine. Well, let\u2019s get to it:<\/p>\n

Our CJ Moore, who\u2019s good at picking this stuff,\u00a0advises us to\u00a0work backward<\/a>, choosing the national champion first. As for that part:<\/p>\n

Matthew Bonesteel used six layers of historical precedent,\u00a0narrowing the field to the likeliest champ<\/a>: Arizona.
\nI applied a version of that method to the women\u2019s bracket, using Sports Reference\u2019s SRS in place of Kenpom. Three No. 1 seeds (South Carolina, UConn and UCLA) passed the test, as did No. 2 LSU.
\nYou could also use r\/collegebasketball\u2019s\u00a0OSOC<\/a>\u00a0metric, which has revealed national champs tend to be either One Seeds Or UConn.<\/p>\n

From there, the rest of the bracket:<\/p>\n

Best chances at men\u2019s upsets, per our math: No. 12 McNeese State vs. No. 5 Vanderbilt and No. 11 VCU over No. 6 North Carolina. Lots more here<\/a>.
\nOur women\u2019s staffers have No. 11 South Dakota State beating No. 6 Washington, and they do not believe in No. 3 Ohio State.\u00a0Full bracket<\/a>.
\nWe also have computer power-ratings projections for both full fields (women\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0men\u2019s<\/a>), which will be updated throughout. I see the vision:<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

Also, before you and I part ways until Friday, it\u2019s a good time to play\u00a0our 16-question tourney predictions game<\/a>. I\u2019m calling for four buzzer beaters in the first weekend, because madness is still real to me.<\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s most-clicked:Anonymous college football coaches<\/a>\u00a0on topics like which teams made the most underrated hires. Look, a college football link!<\/p>\n

Love Until Saturday? Check out\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s other newsletters<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until Saturday Newsletter \ud83c\udfc8\u00a0| This is The Athletic\u2019s college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":817901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[331,7,5480,49,48,5481],"class_list":{"0":"post-817900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-college-football","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-mens-college-basketball","11":"tag-ncaa","12":"tag-ncaa-football","13":"tag-womens-college-basketball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116246803778270868","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}