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SALT LAKE CITY — This week, Arizona will try to do something that hasn't been done before in the NCAA Tournament.
A team has never gone from unranked in the preseason to being a one seed in the tournament to advancing to the Final Four. The Wildcats are the 12th team to earn a one seed after being unranked in the preseason Associated Press poll since the tournament field expanded to 64 teams in 1985 (The pandemic likely cost us an additional example as Dayton figured to be a one seed in 2020 after going unranked in the preseason).
The results for these teams is shockingly poor.
You often hear about how the polls are meaningless; and in a strict sense, that's correct. The polls have no direct bearing on which teams get selected for the tournament or even their seeding. And during the season, the polls become an exercise in moving teams down if they lose and moving teams up if they win. Anyone could do it.
But the preseason poll is different. Before any results occur, media members actually use their expertise, ranking teams by how good they think those teams are. It turns out to be a useful predictive tool. Rarely do teams near the top of the preseason poll fail to make the NCAA Tournament, and rarely do unranked teams achieve great success.
This season, each of the preseason top 10 teams ended up in the tourney and 12 of the top 16 teams on the NCAA seed list were ranked in the preseason poll.
There may be no better example of the value of the preseason poll than the performance of one seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Prior to this season, there have been 144 one seeds in the 36 tournaments since 1985. Of the 133 that were ranked in the preseason, 59 (44.4%) made the Final Four. Of the 11 that were unranked, zero made the Final Four.
Here's the list of one seeds that were unranked in the preseason:
There are two takeaways here. First, the preseason AP poll is a great predictor of which teams are candidates to be one seeds. Including this season, 92% of one seeds have been ranked in the preseason.
Second, the experts' preseason opinion of teams still matters in March. These teams won an average of 1.8 games while the ranked teams won an average of 3.5 games. Given that our ranked teams have had a 44% chance of getting to the Final Four, it is very unlikely that these results can be explained by randomness alone.
But if we're being honest, randomness has played some role. For instance, the 1990 UConn team lost in the Elite Eight by 1 point on Christian Laettner's double-pump buzzer-beater from just inside the 3-point line — an iconic tournament moment that has sadly been forgotten because it ranks second on the list of epic Laettner buzzer-beaters in the Elite Eight. This was after UConn's Tate George nearly intercepted a Bobby Hurley pass that would have put the game away.
And then there's bracket luck. All we've needed for one of these teams to break through is to get some friendly matchups in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight. But the three teams that made it to the Elite Eight either had to face the two-seed from their region, or in UConn's case, the toughest three-seed in the field.
Likewise, Arizona is also not getting any favors this season. Their Sweet 16 opponent on Thursday night is fifth-seeded Houston, and the Cougars have played better this season than most teams seeded higher than them. They're a five seed because they didn't play a bunch of top teams; but in terms of ability, they're much better than their results-based resume suggests. They just happened to get slotted into Arizona's region. And if Arizona wins that game, they'll likely have to beat second-seeded Villanova to get to the Final Four.
Another way we know these teams haven't been bitten by randomness is that unranked teams have made the Final Four before. The most recent example is Texas Tech in 2019 as a three seed. In fact, both Syracuse in 2003 and Florida in 2006 won national titles as three seeds after being unranked in the preseason. Fundamentally, there shouldn't be any reason a three seed could defy preseason expectations while a one seed couldn't.
Yet here we are. Nearly four decades since the tournament expanded to its modern format, no team has overcome an exclusion from the AP poll and then excelled during both the regular season and the tournament. Typically, the preseason poll doesn't miss like that.
Arizona's already proved that preseason expectations were far too low for them this season. Now they have a chance to do what no one seed in their position has ever done and make it to the Final Four.
Ken Pomeroy is the creator of college basketball's advanced statistics site kenpom.com, which has archives dating back to the 2002 season. After a career in meteorology and as an instructor at the University of Utah, Pomeroy's focus is on basketball. He has previously contributed to The Athletic, ESPN, Slate and Deadspin.
