Like many people, you may have heard someone say “March Madness” and might have been puzzled by the term. For those of you who don’t know what March Madness is, it is the annual March NCAA Divison I college men’s and women’s basketball tournament. The men’s tournament was founded in 1939, while the women’s tournament was founded in 1982. All of the teams competing are pinned against each other and are competing to win the NCCA National Championship. The 68 teams are all put into a bracket where the higher seeds are normally set off to face the lower seeds. Slowly as teams advance and others are eliminated the bracket gets smaller until 1 team is crowned the winner. Since the seven-round tournament is a single elimination it is “win or go home.”
These are some of the teams not ranked in the men’s top 4 that I think have a high chance of making the Final Four, Arizona, Kansas, Crieghton, and Illinois. These 4 teams have all severely
dropped in their respective ESPN top 50 rankings but, I believe they could make a big jump. Most of the teams that I have predicted have either dropped in their rankings or increased by multiple wins into the rankings. Arizona was at one point ranked number 1 but, has dropped to 5th place in ESPEN’s rankings. A big reason for this is their losses during close games or when they get blown out because of bad shooting percentages. Even though they are highly ranked their defense still has allowed teams that aren’t on their level to get high-percentage looks. Kansas was also at one point ranked number 1 but dropped all the way to 14th. They were playing amazingly until they started to lose to multiple unranked teams and teams ranked at the bottom of the standings. They were however able to beat Houston who is ranked number 1. Creighton was at one point ranked 8th, then fell to 23rd, and now rose back up to 10th. The reason why the team dropped so much is they lost big one game against an unranked team and continued to drop after that. On March 3rd though Creighton did beat the number 5 ranked Marquette. Illinois started off ranked 25th and built its way up to 9th place and is now slightly on the decline at the 12th spot. Illinois was looking good but, has lost to a number of high-ranked teams and some very good non-ranked. They played Purdue twice and Marquette who are both ranked higher than 5th place.
