Villanova won’t be the first team since Florida to repeat as NCAA Champion after getting bounced in the first weekend by Wisconsin.
Filling out your March Madness bracket is never an exact science and it never will be. Stats, history and basic logic all goes out the window when picking a champion to win the field and sometimes you just have to get weird.
As strange as it sounds, one of the shakiest planes to stand on this year was picking overall No. 1 seed Villanova to win it all. Not because they aren’t capable but because it hasn’t been since Florida did it a decade ago that a champion has repeated.
That won’t be happening again this year. In the second game the Wildcats played on the first weekend of the tournament this year, they’ve been bounced.
To be fair to Jay Wright’s squad, they ran into a horribly under-seeded Wisconsin team that basically everyone wrote off. After all, historically the NCAA Tournament isn’t nice to Big Ten teams and running into he overall No. 1 seed int eh first weekend isn’t what you’d call an easy path.
That didn’t stop Nova fans from absolutely melting down after following up their championship season with a first weekend exit:
https://twitter.com/YaBoyShatone/status/843209262147026944
There was also a recognition of Wisconsin as a real threat:
Of course most of the reaction pertained to people losing it over having their brackets busted apart on the first weekend:
But the Badgers were able to take the Wildcats to the wire and upset them in the final moments of the game. It was tightly contested down the stretch and could have swung either way so it’s not as though ‘Nova was blown out of the tournament.
If anything, the nature in which the Badgers beat the Wildcats should make whoever they see in the second weekend of the tournament very nervous. Wisconsin wasn’t a hot pick to win the tournament — and they might end up losing still — but they need to be taken seriously as a contender after what they just did to ‘Nova.