March Madness, the best time of year for many sports fans. It’s the annual excitement of Cinderella runs, the quest for a perfect bracket, and the overall unpredictability of the tournament that has fans tuning into the action.
This year’s Men’s Tournament, however, was largely disappointing. While the Final Four and Championship games were incredible games to watch, there wasn’t a single Cinderella run in the entire bracket and a majority of
the games were blowouts. The Final Four and Championship were arguably the most exciting games of the tournament, two of which were decided in the game’s final seconds. This was the opposite of last year’s tournament.
I’m a huge fan of Cinderella storylines and sleeper teams, in any sport. If the highest seeded team(s) always win, why bother playing at all? These are the teams that remind us why we play the games, and often give us some of our favorite college basketball memories. Just think back to UCLA’s run to the Final Four as an 11-seed in 2021, 15th-seeded Saint Peter’s run to the Elite Eight three years ago, or No. 15 Princeton upsetting No. 2 Arizona in the opening round en route to the Sweet 16. And don’t forget about the only two times in college basketball history that a 16-seed upset the No. 1.
Without a huge volume of these storylines this season, I wasn’t excited by the action. Whether NIL played a role in this remains to be seen, and I hope it didn’t. Only one double-digit seed made it to the Sweet 16, and the entire Elite Eight was a top-3 seed. That’s not to say that there weren’t some good moments prior to the Final Four, but it didn’t have the same hype that others have had in the past.
But in spite of a top-heavy tournament, the Final Four and National Championship games delivered, and I wish we had the same kind of play when I was there last year. Both Auburn and Florida kept it close the whole game with neither team holding a double-digit lead.
Florida senior guard Walter Clayton Jr. put his talent on display once again, finishing the night with 34 points and 5 triples and becoming the first player with back-to-back 30-point performances since Larry Bird did it for Indiana State in 1979. He then made the critical defensive stop in the national championship two days later.
For Houston, Duke’s 14-point lead with eight minutes to go in the second half of the Final Four wasn’t enough. I’m a huge proponent that “It ain’t over til it’s over” and the Cougars proved exactly that. A 9-0 run in the final 35 seconds was just what they needed to punch a ticket to the National Championship game, until they were on the other end of almost the exact same situation Monday night.
After Houston’s late heroics on Saturday, I had a pretty good feeling the national championship would hail victors to the Gators, but was not prepared for a heavy defensive battle. It was a lower scoring championship game than we normally see, but was still exciting nonetheless. Florida kept close, keeping fans on the edge of their seats until the final buzzer. I was hoping the game would go to overtime, which would’ve been the only OT game of the entire tournament.
Todd Golden’s success was probably my favorite storyline of the tournament, becoming the youngest head coach to win a national championship in over 40 years.
Overall, it just wasn’t that exciting of a tournament. Early exits by nearly all lower-seeded teams left me with no real rooting interest, other than ASU’s Big 12 counterparts. The NCAA Tournament is still the best playoffs in all of sports, but 2025 just wasn’t the year.
