Top seeds will have their hands full in Round 1
The road to Indianapolis is built upon the backs of the broken and the bruised from the bottom of Bracketville. The directional schools. The hyphenated. The obscure.
Those are your teen seeds, Nos. 13 through 16. The bottom four in each region of the NCAA Tournament. The dreamers who come for glory but almost always leave lacking it, mauled out of the tourney by midnight Friday by the game's power programs.
The numbers are stark. Since the field expanded to 64 in 1985, No. 13 seeds are 17-67 in first-round games. Fourteens are 14-70. Fifteens are 4-80. And as every armchair bracketologist can recite, the 16s are historically imperfect: 0-84.
Even the best of these 13th through 16th seeds haven't done much since 1994, when RPI was instituted: a 1-16 record, with last year's Vermont team grabbing the lone win.
| TEAM | YEAR | RPI | RESULT |
| Best 16-seeds | |||
| Albany | 2006 | 119 | ?? |
| Colgate | 1995 | 122 | L 82-68 to Kansas |
| Montana | 1997 | 123 | L 92-54 to Kentucky |
| Delaware State | 2005 | 128 | L 57-46 to Duke |
| Oral Roberts | 2006 | 130 | ?? |
| Best 15-seeds | |||
| Winthrop | 2006 | 73 | ?? |
| No. Arizona | 2000 | 78 | L 61-56 to St. John's |
| Utah State | 2003 | 79 | L 64-61 to Kansas |
| Holy Cross | 2001 | 85 | L 72-68 to Kentucky |
| Sam Houston State | 2003 | 91 | L 85-55 to Florida |
| Rider | 1994 | 91 | L 64-46 to Connecticut |
| Best 14-seeds | |||
| Utah State | 2005 | 50 | L 66-53 to Arizona |
| Hofstra | 2000 | 54 | L 86-66 to Oklahoma St. |
| Manhattan | 2003 | 55 | L 76-65 to Syracuse |
| Northern Iowa | 2004 | 59 | L 65-60 to Georgia Tech |
| Northwestern State | 2006 | 60 | ?? |
| Best 13-seeds | |||
| Vermont | 2005 | 26 | W 60-57 vs. Syracuse |
| Bradley | 2006 | 33 | ?? |
| Drexel | 1994 | 42 | L 61-39 to Temple |
| San Diego State | 2002 | 42 | L 93-64 to Illinois |
| UTEP | 2004 | 46 | L 86-83 to Maryland |
| Hofstra | 2001 | 46 | L 61-48 to UCLA |
That could be about to change. Not to engage in carnival barking here, but I believe we might be on the verge of a peasant revolution this week that would rock college basketball to the soles of its Nikes.
Teen seeds, unite. Realize that you just might be better, as a group, than you've ever been.
Top seeds, take heed. A first-round sleepwalk might end with your falling off a cliff of historic height.
Many of the teen seeds are double champions, winners of their leagues in the regular season and postseason. Only three automatic qualifiers don't have 20 wins. There were fewer fluke conference tourney runs than usual, which means more legitimately deserving teams got in from one-bid leagues.
And those legitimately deserving teams unanimously believe they should have received better seeds. But that's what happens when there's an unusual amount of quality packed into the bottom of the bracket. Good teams have been shoved down lower than they're accustomed to being.
Selection committee chairman Craig Littlepage said Sunday night that he was amazed how long it took to seed the last fourth of the bracket this year. Perhaps because the last fourth has never been this good before.
"I think it's pretty doggone solid, that's for sure," Littlepage said.
If first-weekend upsets are the spice of the NCAA Tournament, take a bite of these potential habaneros:
• Even with the inclusion of Hampton (No. 284 RPI, worst ranking of any NCAA Tournament team in the RPI Era, which dates to 1994), the current No. 16 seeds have their best average RPI ever: 162. If you remove Hampton from the equation, the average plummets to 131. Which basically means that this year's 16s could be 15s in other years.
With an RPI of 119, the Albany Great Danes are the historic big dogs of the 16th-seed neighborhood. Memo to first-round opponent Connecticut, a team whose talent is occasionally sabotaged by indifference: That's the best RPI ever for a No. 16.
"Why not us?" Albany coach Will Brown asked. "Why not the University of Albany? We are preparing to try to win the game."
Not far behind Albany on the 16 line are Oral Roberts (130 RPI) and Southern (132). ORU has won 46 games over the past two years, starts nothing but juniors and seniors, draws a young No. 1 seed in Memphis and actually has a geographic advantage at its first-round site in Dallas. It's only a 3½-hour drive from the Oral Roberts campus in Tulsa, Okla.
"Playing in Dallas gives us the best opportunity to win a game," coach Scott Sutton said. "You're not having to play Villanova in Philadelphia or Connecticut in Philadelphia."
It won't hurt to have thousands of Arkansas fans in the house, either. Arkansas has an intense rivalry with Memphis, and Sutton lived in Fayetteville as a child when his dad, Eddie, was taking the Razorbacks to the Final Four.
"I hope Razorback Nation will support an old Arkansan," Sutton said.
• In keeping with the trickle-up trend, this year's 15s could be 14s in other years. The average RPI of the No. 15 seeds is 95, also the best ever. Some years there are four 15th seeds with triple-digit RPIs; this year there's only one (Belmont).
The Winthrop Eagles, making their sixth NCAA appearance in eight years, have the best-ever RPI for a No. 15 seed at 73. Winthrop won its conference during the regular season, won the league tournament and also shockingly won Marquette's four-team tournament in November, upsetting the home team in the final.
"That's three championships," Eagles coach Gregg Marshall said. "I don't anticipate another championship, but another win or two would be just fine."
Winthrop has quality company on the 15 line. Penn is making its fourth appearance in the past five years. Davidson is back for the third time under Bob McKillop.
Davidson went undefeated in the Southern Conference last year but was upset in the conference tournament -- which actually created the opportunity to play three road games in the NIT. Combine that with ambitious scheduling, and McKillop likes his team's seasoning.
"We have seven seniors who have played in the Dean Dome, the Carrier Dome, Cameron Indoor Stadium," he said. "We've been through some of the prime real estate areas of college basketball."
• The 14-seeds feature two double champions (Murray State and Northwestern State) and a near-double champ (South Alabama, which won its division of the Sun Belt but finished a game behind Western Kentucky for the regular-season title, then routed the Hilltoppers in the tournament final). And then there's Xavier, which was ranked in the Top 25 in January.
• The 13 line includes Big West double-champ Pacific, which beat Pittsburgh in the first round last year, and Bradley, which packs the second-highest RPI ever (33) for a No. 13 seed. The only one higher belonged to No. 26 Vermont last year -- and the Catamounts knocked off Syracuse.
On paper, there are fewer mismatches and walkovers than ever this NCAA Tournament. The teen seeds got game and they're coming en masse, making it more likely they will outperform their historical brethren. The opportunities for a March revolution have rarely, if ever, been this good.
But paper doesn't play.
And as McKillop said, "The top of the bracket's pretty darned good, too."
Pat Forde is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPN4D@aol.com.
