First nine schools to qualify for Sweet Sixteen are from nine different conferences.

[cliftonparksufan]

Many reasons why: recruiting rankings can be subjected, coaching has more to do with preparation and motivation than always having the best talent, transfer portal and pandemic, parity is the new normal. Others?

I'm definitely in the school that post-season is more important than regular season. Especially if you are a top program that doesn't get to the second weekend. Isn't the goal of every team to win the NC. So shouldn't the Calipari's and the McCaffrey be extremely disappointed they didn't live up to their seed. Or are they right to argue that they had a good regular season?

 

[jncuse]

Parity / randomness. We can play this thing with the exact same bracket and we might get only 1 of the same final 4 ... or even none. Or randomly switch the seed lines of half the teams by a line up or down and things could significantly change in the sweet 16.

It also helps to get larger # of conference distribution when you have a powerhouse in the WCC and dare I say it a "Semi-power" in Houston from the AAC. Houston has 3 sweet 16's in a row, and have been #14, #5, and #2 in KP the last 3 years.

 

[cliftonparksufan]

Parity / randomness. We can play this thing with the exact same bracket and we might get only 1 of the same final 4 ... or even none. Or randomly switch the seed lines of half the teams by a line up or down and things could significantly change in the sweet 16.

It also helps to get larger # of conference distribution when you have a powerhouse in the WCC and dare I say it a "Semi-power" in Houston from the AAC. Houston has 3 sweet 16's in a row, and have been #14, #5, and #2 in KP the last 3 years.

It's possible after today that 3 teams will be from the B1G or the Big 12 and like five conferences having two representatives along with the outliers from the WCC, AAC and the MAAC. That's probably what the NCAA and the Networks want. Of course if there are some upsets those numbers could be skewered, like if MSU, ND or Miami wins.

I guess it's great for basketball overall to see more geographical differences.

 

[upperdeck]

all this and if ND held on it was 4 ACC teams and still 3 as many as the SEC and B10 combined. ACC could end up with the most.. Thats an all time shocker for many