The 2018 Sweet 16 is set, and while plenty of notable story lines came out of the NCAA tournament’s opening weekend (Sister Jean! Nevada comebacks! College basketball officiating is still terrible!), the University of Maryland–Baltimore County becoming the first men’s no. 16 seed to ever beat a no. 1 seed remains bigger than all of the others combined. There’s no other way to frame it: It was the single biggest upset college basketball has ever seen and one of the greatest upsets in the history of North American sports. It’s not just that a no. 16 seed finally downed a no. 1 seed that makes the result so incredible. It’s that this no. 16 seed beat this no. 1 seed … and by 20 points, no less! UMBC lost to Albany 83-39 less than two months ago in a game in which the Retrievers scored 12 points in the first half. Virginia, meanwhile, was absolutely dominant from start to (almost) finish this season, posting historic defensive numbers on its way to a 31-2 record entering the tourney. The Cavaliers wiped the floor with arguably the best conference in college basketball, going 17-1 against the same ACC competition that placed nine teams into the NCAA tournament and four into the Sweet 16. (Virginia’s only conference loss came in overtime by a single point.) This was not a case of the Wahoos falling backward into a no. 1 seed. In fact, had Virginia won the national championship in a few weeks, it likely would have gone down as one of the 20 greatest college basketball teams of all time.
Instead, Virginia basketball is once again a punch line. In the immediate aftermath of Friday’s 74-54 loss, critics of Tony Bennett’s unique brand of basketball proudly beat their chest in celebration, most notably Yahoo’s Pat Forde, who probably almost passed out while declaring it an impossibility for a head coach who has ruled the ACC over the past five years to EVER find success in the NCAA tournament. Two days later, UMBC’s historic run came to an end with a 50-43 second-round loss to Kansas State, a game in which the Retrievers shot 29.8 percent from the field and committed 17 turnovers. Whatever hope Virginia fans might have had that UMBC would go deep into the NCAA tournament and make the Wahoos’ loss seem more defensible has officially been extinguished.
So now that the UMBC story is complete and a few days have allowed for emotions to settle, what should we make of Virginia’s blowout loss to a no. 16 seed? And more importantly: What will be the ultimate legacy of that game, both for the programs involved and the sport as a whole?
UMBC’s moment in the sun was likely just that: a moment. There’s an outside chance that the Retrievers can ride this momentum and build a consistently competitive program, which is the ideal trajectory for a tiny school that makes a big splash in the NCAA tournament. Far more likely, however, is that UMBC will enjoy the spoils of the Flutie effect in the short term before ultimately becoming the answer to a trivia question down the road. NCAA tournament upsets can happen in the blink of an eye, but successful programs are not built overnight, which is why UMBC feels destined to become the modern-day version of Chaminade, a program whose identity is so intertwined with its stunning upset of no. 1 Virginia in the 1982 Maui Invitational that the only two sections in the entire athletic department’s Wikipedia page are in reference to that win.
The more interesting case is how this affects Virginia, for whom this loss will always be embarrassing. This, much like that 1982 loss to Chaminade, is a scar the program will carry with it forever. I’ll admit that I subscribe to the theory that if De’Andre Hunter (who was ruled out last Tuesday with a broken left wrist) had been healthy, Bennett would have put him on Jairus Lyles just as Lyles started getting hot, Lyles would’ve likely stopped making game-changing plays, and the snowball of misfortune that quickly turned into a disastrous avalanche for Virginia would never have been triggered. But I’ll also admit that’s irrelevant. Twenty years from now, people won’t remember Hunter’s absence in this game, and certainly won’t remember his nuanced role on this 2017-18 Virginia squad. And honestly, whether Hunter played shouldn’t have mattered. UMBC lost at home to Stony Brook less than a month ago, while Virginia was a damn juggernaut built to withstand the absence of any one player. The Cavaliers had no business losing to anyone by 20 with or without Hunter, much less to a bunch of guys who will go pro in something other than sports.
All of which brings me to a point that I can’t make enough: As much as it might appear otherwise given that the Wahoos just, you know, got their asses kicked by a no. 16 seed, Virginia was incredible this season. There seems to be a prevailing sentiment that by losing to UMBC, the Cavaliers exposed themselves as overrated frauds who only amassed their 31 wins by way of a gimmick. Anyone who believes that, though, defies logic by also believing that Virginia’s loss to UMBC should be viewed as historically humiliating. Just one of those things can be true. The only way the story of David slaying Goliath works is if it’s understood that Goliath was thought to be indestructible. You can’t paint David as a hero who conquered the unconquerable while also claiming that Goliath was really a tiny coward all along. Any notion that Virginia wasn’t the team that so many thought it was entering the NCAA tournament is not only revisionist history and a slap in the face to the amazing season that the Hoos had to that point, but also devalues the magnitude of UMBC’s accomplishment.
Maybe history will look back on the first 16-over-1 upset with an asterisk that suggests this no. 1 seed shouldn’t have ever been a no. 1 seed in the first place. Maybe future college basketball analysts will dismiss this Virginia team because it played a boring brand of basketball and didn’t have elite scorers or multiple NBA-bound players. But make no mistake about it: Nobody will ever forget what UMBC pulled off. A million years from now, when the no. 16 seed from the Andromeda galaxy holds a two-point lead over the no. 1 seed from the Milky Way with five minutes remaining in their first-round matchup in the NCAA’s Intergalactic Tournament, highlights from the 2018 UMBC-Virginia game will be shown in some capacity. The Cavaliers’ place has been permanently etched in history and there’s nothing that can be done to change that.
It’s conceivable that the sting of this loss will lessen over time, though, and that idea goes beyond people mistakenly brushing off the 2017-18 Wahoos as gimmicky, lucky, or fraudulent. It’s also possible that we could see another no. 16 seed win in the tourney, and perhaps sooner than most people think.
At this point, excluding blowouts, the only upsets that still send shockwaves through the NCAA tournament universe are no. 16 seeds beating no. 1 seeds and no. 15 seeds beating no. 2 seeds. But even 15-over-2 results don’t pack the same punch that they used to. In the 27 tournaments from 1985 (when the field expanded to 64 teams) to 2011, there were four instances of no. 2 seeds losing in the first round. In the seven tournaments since, there have been four more. What was once unthinkable has now become somewhat regular, or at least common enough for many fans to balk at the idea of automatically advancing all of the no. 2 seeds to the second round in brackets filled out for office pools.
Now that UMBC has cracked the code, it stands to reason that a similar trend could unfold in the coming years with no. 16 seeds toppling no. 1 seeds. The biggest obstacle preventing this is that automatic bids to the NCAA tournament are given to every conference-tournament winner, meaning shitty teams that happen to get hot for three- or four-day stretches often sneak into the NCAA tournament at the expense of potential no. 16 seeds that could be way more dangerous. A rule change mandating that auto bids must go to regular-season conference champions would make 16-over-1 upsets much more likely, but that will never (and should never) happen. And that’s not the only factor in play anyway. As the 3-point revolution continues to overtake all levels of basketball, it seems inevitable that the big-time programs will come to rely on 3s with the same increasing frequency as mid-majors that fill their rosters with undersized players who have done nothing but bomb 3s their entire lives. This means no. 1 versus no. 16 games might start resembling high-stakes 3-point contests, which is to say there’s no telling what the hell is going to happen.
Just look at the massive upsets of the past few years. UMBC went 12-of-24 from beyond the arc in Friday’s landmark win; Virginia went just 4-of-22 from deep. No. 13 seed Buffalo went 15-of-30 from 3-point range during Thursday’s rout of fourth-seeded Arizona; the Wildcats went an awful 2-of-18. Middle Tennessee State went 11-of-19 from 3-point range in its 15-over-2 upset of Michigan State in 2016; Norfolk State went 10-of-19 from 3 in its 15-over-2 upset of Missouri in 2012; and Marshall went 9-of-23 from deep in its 13-over-4 victory against Wichita State a few days ago. It’s not news to point out that teams that hit 3s have a chance to shock the world in March, as the formula for tourney upsets has long included underdogs making a barrage of shots from long range. Given that we’re in an era when players are taught to shoot 3s and layups with virtually nothing in between, though, I feel comfortable predicting that another 16-over-1 upset will happen during the next 15 years, and that would only help Virginia as this loss to UMBC fades into the history books.
But let’s be honest: The only way for Bennett and Virginia to truly start the process of removing some of the stench unloaded on them by UMBC is to make a Final Four run. Even if undefeated teams from Duke, Kentucky, and North Carolina all lose to no. 16 seeds within the next five years, at least each of those programs would have national championship banners with which to dry their tears. Virginia has nothing of the sort and hasn’t made a Final Four since 1984. The Wahoos now find themselves in a pit of despair, and their solution shouldn’t be to hope that other programs fall into the pit with them—it should be to climb out by continuing to pursue the NCAA tournament success that has eluded them for so long.
Whether that’s plausible under Bennett depends on whom you ask. The coach’s critics were already steadfast in their belief that his style of play can’t work in March before the UMBC debacle, and it’s true that no national champion has fit Virginia’s profile in the modern era. Few teams that are defensive-minded, play a slow tempo, and lack future first-round NBA draft picks have ever made the Final Four. But it’s also true that no coach has dominated the ACC for a decade or longer without reaching that stage, which is why the smart money still says that if Bennett stays the course and keeps putting together teams that destroy their regular-season competition, a March breakthrough will eventually come, no matter how somber the outlook is in Charlottesville right now.
Anyone who thinks otherwise clearly did not pay attention to the most important lesson that UMBC’s historic upset taught us: When it comes to the NCAA tournament, there is no such thing as impossible.
