Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I can’t wait to spend four days agonizing over my bracket selections just to inevitably lose $20 anyway.
In today’s SI:AM:
⛹️♂️ Men’s March Madness picks
⛹️♀️ Women’s March Madness picks
👀 NBA draft prospects to watch
Upset alert
Everyone can agree that the best part of March Madness is the upsets. Every year, the biggest programs in college sports are felled by schools that most fans couldn’t even place on a map. Here are a few potential Cinderellas that could make waves as the tournament gets underway this week.
Men: UC San Diego Tritons (No. 12 seed, facing No. 5 Michigan Wolverines at 10 p.m. ET Thursday)
Most sports fans probably haven’t heard of UC San Diego. This is not the same school as San Diego State or the University of San Diego, both of which have been competing in Division I for over 40 years. UCSD played its first D-I season in 2020–21 and now has reached the NCAA tournament in its first year of eligibility.
Coach Eric Olen has been with the Tritons since 2013, when they were still in D-II. The same goes for women’s basketball coach Heidi VanDerveer (the younger sister of legendary Stanford Cardinal coach Tara VanDerveer), who’s been at UCSD since ’12 and also has the Tritons in the NCAA tournament this year. Athletic director Earl W. Edwards has been at the school since March 2000, when it was still in D-III. Their dedication to building a winning athletics program at UCSD has paid off in a major way in just the first year of D-I postseason eligibility.
Don’t let the quick transition from D-II fool you, though. The UCSD men are the real deal. They went 30–4 this season and have elite advanced metrics. They ranked first in the nation in defensive efficiency and 13th in offensive efficiency, a combination that has them ranked 36th in KenPom. They played a pretty easy schedule (175th-hardest in the nation) but they do boast an impressive road win over the Utah State Aggies, a team that earned an at-large selection.
UCSD will face a good Michigan team in the first round, but the Wolverines are not without their flaws, especially on offense. The Tritons will be a trendy pick to pull off the classic 12 vs. 5 upset.
Women: Fairfield Stags (No. 12 seed, facing No. 5 Kansas State Wildcats at 2:30 p.m. ET Friday)
Fairfield is back in the tournament after dominating the MAAC for the second straight year. The Stags carried a 29-game winning streak into the NCAA tournament last season before falling in the first round against the Indiana Hoosiers to finish the season at 31–2. This year could be different, though.
Fairfield played a dramatically harder schedule this season (73rd-hardest in the nation, compared to 331st last year) but still managed to compile a 28–4 record. It boasts road wins over the Arkansas Razorbacks and Wake Forest Demon Deacons and a home victory against the Villanova Wildcats.
This is an exceptionally experienced team, having returned 90.6% of its scoring from last year’s squad. Fairfield will face a Kansas State team that has one of the best offenses in the nation, so winning certainly won’t be easy. But after last year’s valuable March Madness experience, the Stags won’t be caught looking like a deer in the headlights.
Women: Murray State Racers (No. 11 seed, facing No. 6 Iowa Hawkeyes at noon ET Saturday)
The Racers live up to their name, playing at ninth-fastest pace of any team in the nation. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, then, that they also lead the nation with 87.8 points per game. But they aren’t just a bunch of gunslingers, ranking 34th nationally in field goal percentage and third in offensive efficiency. The key player is fifth-year senior Katelyn Young, a 6' 1" forward who ranks 11th nationally with 22.2 points per game.
Murray State matches up favorably against its first round opponent, Iowa, which has a thoroughly mediocre defense (197th in points allowed per game). The Racers could run circles around the Hawkeyes.
Men: Yale (No. 13 seed, facing No. 4 Texas A&M Aggies at 7:25 p.m. ET Thursday)
Fresh off an upset over the No. 4 seed Auburn Tigers last year, Yale is back in the tournament and hoping for a repeat performance. That upset was fueled by some hot three-point shooting, and if the Bulldogs are going to do it again, it’s likely that their success from beyond the arc will be the biggest factor.
Yale ranks eighth nationally in three-point shooting percentage this season at 38.8%, a sizable improvement from last season, when it ranked 121st (35.1%). Senior John Poulakidas led the Ivy League in scoring this season with 19.2 points per game and is the Bulldogs’ leading three-point shooter at 40.9%.
Texas A&M, meanwhile, has been sluggish at times on offense, ranking 132nd nationally in points per 100 possessions. Could Yale pull off a second straight upset over an SEC team?
Men: Drake Bulldogs (No. 11 seed, facing No. 6 Missouri Tigers at 7:35 p.m. ET Thursday)
Like the Ivy League Bulldogs, Drake is also making a return trip to March Madness. But this might be the most unlikely tournament team in the field of 68.
Drake was a popular Cinderella pick last year as a No. 10 seed before losing a tight one to the Washington State Cougars in the first round. Head coach Darian DeVries then left to take over the West Virginia Mountaineers and took the Bulldogs’ star player, his son, Tucker, with him. Most of the remaining roster also hit the transfer portal, and so new coach Ben McCollum had to build a team from scratch.
McCollum arrived at Drake after an ultra-successful run at D-II Northwest Missouri State, where he won four national championships. Three of his best players followed him to Drake, and he cobbled together the rest of the roster with other transfers. The few holdovers accounted for just 5.1% of the Bulldogs’ scoring from last season.
But the results have been way better than anyone could have expected for a team led by several former D-II players. Drake is 30–3 and boasts wins over Kansas State and the Vanderbilt Commodores. The Bulldogs grind their opponents into a paste by playing at the slowest pace of any team in the nation. That’s why you should ignore their ugly national ranking in points per game (282nd) and focus instead on their impressive efficiency rankings (42nd offensively, 15th defensively).
Mizzou had its own remarkable turnaround this season after going 8–24 last year (and 0–18 in SEC play), but Drake could expose the Tigers’ defensive shortcomings.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Before you fill out your brackets, make sure to consult our experts’ picks. Here are our picks for the men’s games and the women’s games.
- Pat Forde’s annual “Forty Things to Watch” is always a must-read before the start of the men’s tournament.
- Emma Baccellieri took a closer look at the women’s bracket, including why South Carolina might have lucked out even though it didn’t get the top overall seed.
- Bryan Fischer thinks these are the 10 first-round men’s games most worth watching.
- Kevin Sweeney has a list of six NBA draft hopefuls to keep an eye on during March Madness.
- Mookie Betts won’t play in the Dodgers’ season-opening series in Japan this week after an illness caused him to lose 15 pounds.
- There was some funny confusion when the lesser postseason basketball tournaments announced their brackets, as both the NIT and CBI selected one of the same teams.
The top five…
… things I saw yesterday:
5. Florida’s 7' 9" freshman Olivier Rioux cutting down the nets without a ladder after the Gators won the SEC tournament.
4. Red Wings rookie Albert Johansson’s sweet move for his second NHL goal.
3. CBS’s tribute to the late Greg Gumbel.
2. Lionel Messi’s spectacular first goal of the MLS season.
1. Anthony Edwards’s latest poster dunk.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Five Trendy March Madness Upset Picks.
