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There are no bad opening weekends of the NCAA Tournament.
The sheer volume of action makes at least some drama and excitement inevitable. With 48 games over a span of four days, cool stuff is bound to happen. Such as Tarris Reed Jr.’s 31 points and 27 rebounds against Furman, the most boards in a tournament game since 1973.
The opening two rounds of this tournament were more predictable than usual, and the overall competitiveness of the games wasn’t great. But a case could be made that the overall quality of play was quite good.
Upsets are what make the first Thursday and Friday of the event, and last week had few. Then again, the definition of a Cinderella team has changed over the years, so trying to determine its status — dead or alive — is not so straightforward.
This all raises the question: Did we just have fun? The answer is yes, of course, but was it enough? Did the first weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament deliver the requisite amount of March Madness?
We tend to judge in the moment against our idealized perception of the opening two rounds of the tournament. Some are no doubt better than others, but the perfect first weekend probably doesn’t exist. We squeeze together sorted memories accumulated over years and then expect them all to come to life over the course of about 70 hours, mostly spent watching from the couch.
Before we move on to the Sweet 16, let’s take one last look back at the first and second rounds to see how they stacked up for entertainment value.
Upsets
Since the NCAA Tournament went to 64 teams in 1985, only seven times have the top 16 seeds (Nos. 1 through 4 in each region) gone undefeated in the first round. This season marked the second year in a row that has happened.
That is most definitely not fun. But we’ve also been spoiled by some of the biggest upsets of history happening fairly recently.
The first two 16 seeds to beat No. 1s (UMBC and Fairleigh Dickinson) happened in the last eight years. Of the 11 total 15 seeds to win first-round games, seven pulled it off from 2012 to 2023. And four of those teams went on to win a second-round game, starting with Florida Gulf Coast in 2013. In three straight seasons (2021-23), a No. 15 made the Sweet 16, including St. Peter’s miraculous run to the Elite Eight in 2023.
This was never normal, but now we’ve come to not just expect the unexpected but also demand it.
Last weekend, High Point and VCU struck blows for double-digit-seeded mid-majors with solid first-round upsets.
High Point over Wisconsin was Big South over Big Ten, which made it seem like a bigger deal than it probably even was. The 12-5 upset has become routine, with 12 seeds winning 35 percent of the time since 1985. The Panthers’ win came with some side drama when coach Flynn Clayman called out power-conference programs for ducking quality mid-majors, essentially making it impossible for those schools to boost their resumes in the eyes of the selection committee.
VCU is no stranger to injecting madness into March. The Rams were the first team to go from First Four to Final Four in 2011. Beating sixth-seeded North Carolina with Tar Heels star Caleb Wilson sidelined by a broken thumb was no shocker, but the how (19-point comeback) and the ramifications (Hubert Davis’ last game as Tar Heels coach?) made it the centerpiece result of Day 1.
And Siena put a very legitimate scare into No. 1 Duke, for good measure.
As for Day 2, that was a chalky dud. Kentucky’s great escape against Santa Clara robbed the upset gods of a Wildcat sacrifice but provided one of the most exhilarating finishes of the tournament and a historic buzzer-beater from Otega Oweh to send the game to overtime.
Cal Baptist (vs. Kansas) and Furman (vs. UConn) at the very least forced fans to flip over at points during their games to see what was going on.
High Point gave it another go in the second round, with 5-foot-10 senior Rob Martin (30 points) going shot-for-shot with future lottery pick Darius Acuff Jr. of Arkansas. John Calipari’s Razorbacks were too much for the Panthers, but Martin left a mark.
“Just trying to fight to survive,” Calipari said afterward.
The emotions of March 💔#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/2ixqxSpdIG
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2026
There was a time when Cinderella didn’t have to be from a small school.
Villanova was a No. 8 seed when in 1985 it pulled off what still ranks as maybe the greatest championship game upset in NCAA Tournament history against Patrick Ewing and Georgetown. NC State was seeded sixth in 1983 when it beat Houston’s Phi Slama Jama team with Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon.
In 2014, UConn won it all as a No. 7 seed, but by then, we had seen George Mason (2006) and VCU from the Colonial Athletic Association get to the Final Four and Butler get there twice from the Horizon League.
A few years later, Loyola Chicago and Sister Jean reached the Final Four as an 11-seed from the Missouri Valley Conference.
As the power conferences (Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and SEC) have turned into superconferences and gobbled up more and more at-large bids, it has made it impossible to embrace their teams as underdogs. Even when 11th-seeded Texas goes from the First Four to the Sweet 16, beating third-seeded Gonzaga along the way.
“I don’t think we ever really want to sign up to be the Cinderella story because we are the University of Texas and, look, we represent the SEC as well,” Texas coach Sean Miller said.
Competitive games
The average margin of victory in the first round was 17.4 points, the highest since the tournament expanded in 1985, per ESPN. Friday was particularly lopsided, with an average margin of victory of 19.7 points, the highest on a single day with at least three games played in NCAA Tournament history, also per ESPN.
The second round was more in line with recent history. The average margin of games played Saturday and Sunday was 13.3 points.
Below are the average margins of second-round games in the last five NCAA Tournaments.
2021: 13.5 points
2022: 10.2 points
2023: 10.8 points
2024: 15.8 points
2025: 9.0 points
Five second-round games were decided by at least 20 points, which tied 2024 for the most over the last six tournaments. But there were also seven decided by single digits, right in line with most recent tournaments. Plus, ninth-seeded Utah State hung tough with top-seeded Arizona and lost by 12.
Nebraska’s second-round victory over Vanderbilt on Saturday was a banger, the game of the tournament so far, made even better by the fact the Cornhuskers did not have a single NCAA Tournament victory before Thursday.
Iowa’s elimination of defending national champion Florida was maybe the highlight of Sunday’s second-round action. The Hawkeyes became just the ninth No. 9 seed to beat a top seed since seeding began in 1979. Though again, a Big Ten team beating an SEC team doesn’t feel quite as compelling as UTEP over Kansas (1992) or UAB over Kentucky (2004).
ARE. YOU. JOKING.
IOWA LEADS. THIS IS MARCH. #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/sNDHTqaGj1
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 23, 2026
Quality of play
So here’s the weird thing: Close games are good, but they are not always well played. See St. John’s-Kansas, one of only five games in rounds 1 and 2 in which the winning team did not crack 70 points. The Johnnies missed 24 3-pointers; the Jayhawks turned it over 16 times.
By comparison, there were six games in the first two rounds last season when the winning team didn’t reach 70 points and eight in 2024’s first weekend.
For a lot of the 2000s, college basketball was a sloggy, physical game. In some ways mimicking the NBA, the college game has picked up the pace and become more free-flowing. That can produce a better quality of ball.
According to the NCAA, teams are shooting 44.51 percent from the floor through two rounds. That’s on pace to be the highest percentage of the past six tournaments, none of which broke 44 percent for the entire event. The 3-point field goal percentage (34.16) is just off the best of the past six tournaments. Scoring is up (75.1 points per game per team), and turnovers per game are down (below 10 per team).
There have been six 100-point games in the tournament so far (all in the first round). According to the NCAA, the last time there were more than six was 1992, when there were seven. From 2010 to 2023, there were a total of 10 100-point games.
Though a case can be made that name, image and likeness payments and the transfer portal have made mid-major teams weaker as they become farm teams for the big schools, the very best teams are better and more experienced now than they were before those developments.
The downside to those two factors, improved style of play and quality of the top teams, is they combine to create more lopsided scores.
Michigan-Saint Louis was a good example. The ninth-seeded Billikens and top-seeded Wolverines play a similar aesthetically pleasing style, but Michigan does so with bigger and more athletic players. The two played an entertaining first half in Buffalo, N.Y., but ultimately, the Wolverines won by 23.
It was fun for a while.
Memorable moments
The tit-for-tat 3-pointers by Santa Clara’s Allen Graves and Otega Oweh of Kentucky in the final three seconds of regulation in the Wildcats’ first-round win were straight from “One Shining Moment” central casting. Quintessential March Madness.
The beyond-half-court shot by Vandy’s Tyler Tanner that went in and out at the buzzer against Nebraska might replace Gordon Hayward’s desperation heave against Duke in 2010 as the most memorable near-miss in tournament history.
Wow. 😱#MarchMadness https://t.co/wkNwZY4kCT pic.twitter.com/wQricCOopc
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2026
True buzzer-beaters, shots that win the game with no time left on the clock, are a pretty rare thing in the NCAA Tournament, though the memories are so strong they might seem more frequent — even when they happen in the first two rounds.
Here is every winner in the men's NCAA Tournament since 2016 with 0.00 on the clock when the ball was in the air.
Per CBS Sports research, Darling is the ONLY player to make an NCAAT game-winner at the horn with zero made FGs in the game prior to hitting a buzzer-beater 🤯🔔🔔 pic.twitter.com/jmLlCegzrr
— Matt Norlander (@MattNorlander) March 22, 2026
UConn fans probably can remember Tate George beating Clemson in 1990 like it was yesterday. Mention Bryce Drew to an Ole Miss fan, and 28 years later, it’ll still sting.
St. John’s guard Dylan Darling is now that guy for Kansas fans. His only 2 points sent the Jayhawks home at the horn in the first tournament meeting between Hall of Fame coaches Rick Pitino and Bill Self.
DYLAN DARLING GAME WINNER OMG 🚨
ST. JOHN'S ADVANCES TO THE SWEET 16 🤯 pic.twitter.com/cgtCSgKHe5
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2026
“And I probably don’t deserve this,” Darling said. “I was pretty bad all night long, but my teammates held it down tonight.”
That might sum up last weekend pretty well. On the whole, it wasn’t that great, but when it was done, there was more than enough to feel satisfied.
