When Gardner-Webb’s basketball team returned to practice after celebrating the first NCAA tournament berth in school history, coach Tim Craft showed his players a…
When Gardner-Webb’s basketball team returned to practice after celebrating the first NCAA tournament berth in school history, coach Tim Craft showed his players a mashup of some of the biggest March Madness upsets ever.
Invariably, one game in particular had a prominent role in the video, as it will in all NCAA tournament reels from now until the end of time.
“We probably had 10 or 12 highlights of those types of upsets throughout the tournament’s history to create a sense of belief that dreams can happen,” Craft said. “One of them was the UMBC-Virginia game. Of course, we had no idea we’d be playing Virginia.”
Gardner-Webb, champions of the Big South Conference, will have the distinction Friday of being the first NCAA tournament opponent for No. 1 seed Virginia since its historic and humiliating defeat to UMBC, which last March became the first No. 16 seed in 136 tries to win a first-round game.
In the short-term, that’s probably not great news for Gardner-Webb, which will almost certainly have Virginia’s full attention this weekend. But in the bigger picture, it raises an interesting question: Now that UMBC has proven a 16-over-1 upset can happen, how quickly will it happen again?
“I would put my guard up now every year going forward because 16 seeds know what can be done. They’ve seen it,” ESPN analyst Jimmy Dykes said. “I’m not going to say it’ll happen within the next two or three years, but no one should now automatically say, ‘All the 1s advance’ because you have to look at the styles, the number of good players out there and the belief factor now. There has to be the first time before there’s a second time. So I think any coach of a 16 seed is saying to his guys, ‘We know it can happen, so let’s do it again.’”
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In reality, for all the conversation over the last year about UMBC 74, Virginia 54 as something of a seminal moment in NCAA tournament history, perhaps the biggest upset is that it took 34 years to happen.
After the tournament expanded to 64 in 1985, it took only one year for a No. 14 seed to beat a No. 3, which has subsequently happened 20 more times.
The first No. 15 seed to beat a No. 2 came in 1991 when Richmond upset Syracuse. And while those upsets have occurred with less frequency, we no longer think of them as impossible. In fact, we should probably expect them every few years given that they’ve happened in 2016,2013,2012 (twice), 2001,1997 and 1993, victimizing blueblood programs like Duke, Michigan State, Arizona and Georgetown.
So wouldn’t the natural progression of that trend mean that a 1 seed should get knocked off in the first round perhaps once or twice a decade rather than once every 35 years?
“It wouldn’t surprise me if it happens again,” UMBC athletics director Tim Hall said.
