NCAA Tournament 2017: 5 dark horses that could go far

Marquette Golden Eagles

A potential dark horse candidate that may be flying a bit under the radar is the Marquette Golden Eagles. Though they are one of just two teams to have beaten overall 1-seed Villanova during the regular season, they struggled a bit with inconsistency in the conference season, finishing at 19-12. That led to the 10-seed in the East, staring down a matchup with South Carolina in their home state.

But Marquette is more dangerous than you’d think. They finished the season as the absolute best 3-point shooting team in the country, hitting an incredible 43 percent from behind the arc on the 14th-highest attempt rate in the country. This fuels much of the seventh-ranked offense in the nation, but it’s not all Marquette is. They’re also quite efficient inside the arc, finishing with a top-50 2-point percentage in the country, and are among the most reliable teams from the free throw line in the country.

The unspoken part of this, of course, is their defense — it’s bad. Marquette goes into the tournament as the 154th-best defense in the country, and the Golden Eagles don’t do much well. Their 2-point and 3-point percentages allowed are in the bottom third of the country, and they don’t block many shots. It’s a deficiency that certainly puts a cap on their ceiling as a dark horse.

But the things they do well (and poorly) align with South Carolina’s weaknesses. Marquette is one of the better teams in the country at generating steals, forcing them on 10.8 percent of possessions (top 50 in the country) — and South Carolina is prone to turnovers. And while Marquette can’t defend from 3, South Carolina can’t shoot it from there. The Gamecocks have hit 33.4 percent of their 3s this year, near the bottom 100 in the country.

And while I can’t say this appears to make up well with Duke, one of the better shooting teams in the country, any team that can shoot as well as Marquette can win a game by going supernova from beyond the arc. It helps that Duke hasn’t been a great defensive team, even during their recent run.

The all-offense, no-defense model isn’t one of the strongest for sustained tournament success, as I looked at here. But, 36 percent of teams with offenses inside the top ten and defenses outside the top 100 have made the Sweet 16 in the last 15 tournaments. Marquette certainly qualifies as dangerous; we’ll see if they come through on the promise.