Stage set for March Madness

This time around, the drama began before the brackets even came out.

Kentucky, Syracuse and North Carolina all earned top seeding for the NCAA tournament Sunday despite surprising weekend losses that brought more intrigue to the three-week, 67-game tournament better known as March Madness.

Michigan State earned the other No. 1 seed and was the only one of the four top-billed teams to win its conference tournament. The Spartans defeated Ohio State 68-64 in the Big Ten title game ― a contest widely viewed as the game for the last No. 1 seed, even if selection committee chairman Jeff Hathaway wouldn’t quite go there.

“As it turned out, this game put the No. 1 seed into the field,” he said.

While No. 2 seeds Kansas, Duke, Missouri and Ohio State wonder whether they could have been rated higher, teams such as Drexel, Seton Hall, Mississippi State and Pac-12 regular-season champion Washington curse what might have been. Those bubble teams were left out, and all will be wondering how Iona, California and South Florida made it.

In the moments immediately after the brackets came out, the Iona-Drexel debate was getting the most traction.

“They weren’t the last team in,” Hathaway said of Iona. “They had a very good nonconference strength of schedule; they were 44. I know a lot of people are going to try to compare them to Drexel, and Drexel was well over 200. We think we got that one right. Obviously, a lot of people will debate it, and that’s what makes it fun.”

There were 11 at-large teams from the so-called mid-major conferences, four more than last year and the most since 2004 when 12 made it. Though the committee claims not to consider a team’s conference when it picks the bracket, this was nonetheless a nod to the free-for-all this tournament can be. Last year, 4,000-student Butler finished as national runner-up for the second straight season, while VCU, of the Colonial Athletic Conference, went from one of the last teams in all the way to the Final Four.

Who might this year’s VCU be?

It’s the question being asked across the country.

Kentucky (32-2) and Syracuse (31-2) each enter the tournament with only two losses. Both were shoo-ins for top seeds ― Hathaway all but said so last week ― though their recent losses certainly will add more guesswork to those millions of brackets being filled out at spring training sites, corporate board rooms and everywhere else across America.

“There were 112 teams with more than 20 wins,” Hathaway said. “We talked a lot about parity at the high end of the field and about quality throughout the field. Bottom line, it was about who did you play, where’d you play them and how did you do?” (AP)