You can learn a lot about these teams from a lot of places, and you can hear the biggest storylines in a lot of places as well, including elsewhere on this site. The goal here is to give you a quick, headline summary acquainting you with each of the 68 teams in the NCAA Tournament bracket. For those with which college basketball fans are generally familiar, we’ll tell you about this year’s team. For those you might not know as well, more about the school.
Going down the bracket:
West Regional
#1 Gonzaga: Not invincible but about as good as ever. Drew Timme’s one of the nation’s best players, Chet Holmgren’s a phenom.
#16 Georgia State: Huge public school in Atlanta. Got healthy after a rough first half of the year, haven’t lost in over a month now. That’s not nothing in the Sun Belt.
#8 Boise State: Good last year, really good this year (by Mountain West standards). Lead with defense and slow it down.
#9 Memphis: Horrible start, seem to have figured it out and saved Penny Hardaway’s job. Lot of talent, attack the rim.
#5 UConn: Strong inside, got some scrap to ‘em. Core’s experienced playing with each other. Have been a good team all year but never got into national title conversations.
#12 New Mexico State: Not NMSU’s best, but another competitive team. Same style as the last few: on the slower side, aggressive around the basket, shoot a good number of threes.
#4 Arkansas: Latecomer to the national scene this year after taking it easy for a month and then playing like garbage for a month. They turned it on when the second semester started: only three losses in the last sixty days, only Saturday’s was by double digits.
#13 Vermont: Best Vermont team yet, and they’ve had some good ones. Awesome offensively, low-mistake style of play.
#6 Alabama: A bunch of great wins, a ton of medium losses, a few real stinkers. Major step back from last year, but the ability’s still there. Just hasn’t been clicking.
#11A Rutgers: Dominated for two weeks in February, have been pretty mediocre besides that. Down year for the Big Ten, which is still a good league, but is having a down year.
#11B Notre Dame: Enormous down year for the ACC, which was very mediocre. Senior-heavy crew for the Irish. Great shooting team, weaker defensively. Pretty consistent, but low ceiling.
#3 Texas Tech: Same old Texas Tech, even with Chris Beard gone. Probably not as good as the ’19 team, but close. Mark Adams is the new coach, and he’s either the last thing you’d expect or exactly what you’d expect.
#14 Montana State: Quietly won 27 games. Head coach is named Danny Sprinkle. Tons of free throws in their games.
#7 Michigan State: Looked underwhelming on opening night against Kansas, never really rallied, played pretty badly down the stretch. Great shooting team that doesn’t shoot much, has plenty of fine wins but pretty unimpressive edition of Michigan State overall.
#10 Davidson: Shoots the lights out, can give up a whole lot of points. That gets masked a little because they play slow.
#2 Duke: Not as bad as their worst (losing to Virginia at home), not as good as their best (beating Gonzaga in Vegas). Paolo Banchero is fun. Not overwhelming, but certainly good.
#15 Cal State-Fullerton: The baseball school. Huge, like so many of those California state colleges. Not much to know.
East Regional
#1 Baylor: Injured as hell, still playing pretty well. Make opponents make mistakes.
#16 Norfolk State: Best team from one of the HBCU leagues in at least five years. Great on defense except they foul a lot, bad on offense except they can get to the line.
#8 North Carolina: Weird year for the Tar Heels. A few terrible games, a few great ones, but not streaky. Long, but they don’t offensive rebound like those Roy Williams teams always did. Hubert Davis is in his first year at the helm.
#9 Marquette: Great run in the middle of the year, but some of that was luck in close games, which evened out elsewhere on the schedule. Extremely young in Shaka Smart’s first year up there.
#5 Saint Mary’s: Best Saint Mary’s team either ever or since 2017’s. Still doing the international thing, specifically Australia, but not leading with shooting anymore. Defense-first team that limits threes and free throws.
#12A Wyoming: Got dicey down the stretch, but great year for the Cowboys, who came out of the periphery to contend for the title in a beefed-up Mountain West for much of the year. Jeff Linder’s in his second year there, up-and-coming name.
#12B Indiana: Mike Woodson’s the new coach, salvaged the year in the Big Ten Tournament after a vad run in February and into March. Defense-first, strong inside.
#4 UCLA: Same crew that almost knocked off Gonzaga last year. Had a few bad stretches, but very good team, and great with the ball. Better than their seed line, not in the Baylor realm, let alone the Gonzaga realm. Able to compete with those teams, though.
#13 Akron: The Zips. Little public school in the MAC. Coached by John Groce, the old Ohio and then Illinois guy. Slow tempo, get to the line, not much else too noteworthy.
#6 Texas: Didn’t live up to the hype in the first Chris Beard year. Have a bunch of guys who are very good but not quite great, and they don’t always mesh that well. Still a potent team—very hard to beat—but not the breakout that was expected.
#11 Virginia Tech: Crazy-good shooters, adequate on defense, mostly through not making mistakes. Mike Young was at Wofford when they had that good team in ’19 with Fletcher Magee. Hard luck early, were 10-10 at one point, turned it on down the stretch. Better in KenPom than Alabama, Colorado State, Wisconsin, and Providence among teams seeded 6th or better.
#3 Purdue: Phenomenal offense, one of the worst defenses of any at-large team. Zach Edey’s extraordinarily efficient, Jaden Ivey makes some exhilarating plays.
#14 Yale: Far from James Jones’s best, weird in that they missed last year so they may have had a long ramp up, which would explain the terrible nonconference performance.
#7 Murray State: Such a fun team. Missed their big moment against Auburn in December, so they haven’t really been tested (when they played Memphis, Memphis was in the throes of stinking), but thirty wins and no obvious weak spots is pretty darn good.
#10 San Francisco: Lost all five against Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s, lost to Loyola, but have played pretty darn well taken as a whole. Big three-point shooting team, finally broke through the NIT wall after a lot of years of almost.
#2 Kentucky: One of the best teams in the country. Very capable of winning it all. Oscar Tshiebwe is dominant. Game changing rebounder.
#15 Saint Peter’s: The Peacocks, which is fun. Small Jesuit school in Jersey City, took a big step forward this year. Out of Iona’s conference. Legitimately good on defense. Quite bad offensively, but aggressive around the hoop.
South Regional
#1 Arizona: Title contender. Well-rounded, long, not quite Gonzaga on paper but right there with Kentucky and Baylor. Bennedict Mathurin and Dalen Terry are their names to know, Kerr Kriisa’s ankle is their big question mark.
#16A Wright State: Small public school in Dayton. Not exactly a regular from the Horizon League lately, but have frequently been in the mix. Have some good offensive numbers inside the arc but look pretty overmatched against Arizona.
#16B Bryant: Small private school in Rhode Island. Don’t know much about it as a school, but on the basketball court they play lightning-fast and Peter Kiss is a phenomenal scorer, though arguably a product of volume.
#8 Seton Hall: Solid team, nothing all that special within the context of Seton Hall over recent years. Defense-first, can get into some pretty ugly games.
#9 TCU: They’ve got this guy named Eddie Lampkin who isn’t outrageously good but is listed at 6’11” and 268 lbs., is a freshman, and is a menace on the offensive glass. Navigated the Big 12 gauntlet well, fine team, capable of stunners but generally just fine.
#5 Houston: Hard to read because the AAC was pretty bad this year. The numbers love them, but the numbers often love Houston. Weirdly have just one win over an at-large team, and that was yesterday against Memphis. Wouldn’t be shocking if they lost on Friday, wouldn’t be that surprising if they took down Arizona. Pretty big unknown.
#12 UAB: These guys were one of those good mid-majors who looked like they just weren’t going to have done enough. Then, Louisiana Tech knocked off North Texas, the door opened, and UAB walked through it. They aren’t the best 12-seed (that’s Indiana), but they’re as good as a lot of teams on the 7-line and beyond. Jelly Walker is turning into a folk hero. 5’11” kid who’s shot a ridiculous 41% on more than eight three-point attempts per game. Not that big a school for being a state school in a city, but Birmingham is fairly small.
#4 Illinois: Never really got it all together, which is kind of the story up top in the Big Ten. There’s a chance that this is a flawed story—that the Big Ten ate itself up and looks worse than it is—but we have a pretty good idea it isn’t the story, and that the Big Ten just has eight good teams and zero great ones. Kofi Cockburn’s a force.
#13 Chattanooga: If you remember Silvio De Sousa from Kansas…he’s at Chattanooga now, and the Mocs (short for Mockingbirds, used to be short for Moccasins) figured it out over the last two weeks of SoCon hoops to survive what had nearly been a fumbled-away opportunity to enter the tournament as a popping mid-major. They’re comparable to Rutgers and South Dakota State in quality, but a good ways off from the bulk of the field. Technically UT-Chattanooga, fairly small.
#6 Colorado State: Confusing team. One of the last undefeateds but played an abbreviated nonconference schedule, I believe because of the omicron wave. Great offensively, kind of poor defensively, have won a ton of close games which isn’t always a good sign.
#11 Michigan: Had a pretty ugly stretch there around New Year’s, but got out of it to be fine. Just fine. Not national championship-caliber, as they looked to be entering the year. That got cleared up pretty quickly. The talent’s probably still there, but it just doesn’t click this year, or hasn’t yet.
#3 Tennessee: Sometimes a team that’s really good defensively looks like a bad basketball team, because there games turn ugly fast. Texas Tech does this, but we’re used to it, so they get away with it. Tennessee does this, and they get discounted for it. All year, they’ve been good, and with their performance in the SEC Tournament, it’s probably fair to ask if they’re capable of winning it all. That doesn’t mean they’re likely to win it all, but between them and Auburn, who was ranked first in the country for a good part of the year, Tennessee’s the better team on paper right now.
#14 Longwood: We’ve called a few public schools small, but Longwood’s really small, located in Farmville, Virginia, in the south-central part of the state. The Lancers are a great shooting team and they’re strong on the glass, both of which are good things. They’re a long ways back from the 12-seeds and a few 13’s in terms of ability, but nothing to be ashamed of if you’re Longwood.
#7 Ohio State: Like many in the Big Ten, Ohio State has a very good offense and a bad defense. They rely a lot on E.J. Liddell, and he’s a good guy to rely on. The Buckeyes are coming off a rough little run in which they’ve lost to both Nebraska and Penn State, but it’s easy to make too much of that, even if the committee probably made too little of it.
#10 Loyola: This is the Chicago Loyola we’re talking about, and they’re back, even with Porter Moser gone. Good offense, held back by turnovers. Even better defense. Haven’t looked at betting odds but this is one of the first round’s best games on paper.
#2 Villanova: Villanova never quite got over the hump into national championship contention, aside from maybe a few brief moments in January. It’s much of the same crew as last year, but last year as well, they just weren’t that special. If they do run into Tennessee, it’ll be a good game. Very different teams, not dissimilar quality. Nova’s a hair behind the Vols right now but that could change.
#15 Delaware: Delaware can put the ball in the basket and can get to the free throw line. They won the CAA Tournament after kind of muddling through CAA play. Nothing too inspiring here, but sometimes that’s overblown.
Midwest Regional
#1 Kansas: The final 1-seed, at least listed here, Kansas isn’t as good on paper as the others, but they have the best résumé, including a co-Big 12 regular season crown and the victory in the conference tournament. They’re well-rounded, Ochai Agbaji’s great, they’ve just failed to consistently dominate. Even after they punked Baylor, they went and lost in Austin, and then they dropped back to back games in Waco and Fort Worth as February turned to March. Could definitely go on a run (their draw is envious), but they’re more beatable than their seed-line contemporaries.
#16A Texas Southern: A small HBCU out of Houston, playing in the SWAC, Texas Southern often takes on the toughest conference schedule imaginable. This year’s ended up not being horrific (Oregon, Washington, NC State, BYU, Louisiana Tech, and Florida all underwhelmed), but the Tigers did take down Florida in Gainesville, and despite a few stumbles against Alcorn State in regular season play, they were almost always considered the SWAC’s best team. They’re strong in a lot of regards on defense, but they can get hurt at the free throw line.
#16B Texas A&M-Corpus Christi: A smaller branch of the Texas A&M system, TAMU-CC or however you want to abbreviate it played, by some accounts (KenPom), the easiest schedule in the nation. They went 23-11 against it, which is…not that good. They can be pretty fun to watch, though. Play fast, with lots of turnovers and fouls and offensive boards. All the chaos things.
#8 San Diego State: A great defensive team, good enough to make up for some bad offense. As is not unusual from this program, for over a decade now.
#9 Creighton: In a big flip from the last two years, Creighton’s had some offensive struggles this year, especially in shooting threes. In another big flip, they play much better defense now, especially inside. Solid year in the Big East, have cleaned up a few times but also laid some eggs.
#5 Iowa: Outstanding offense, but bad on the defensive side of the ball. Keegan Murray is really freaking good.
#12 Richmond: The bid thieves. Experienced crew who never put it all together but pulled through this weekend. More of the New Mexico State genre of 12-seeds quality-wise than the UAB/Wyoming/Indiana crew.
#4 Providence: Providence won a tremendous number of close games this year, which probably means they aren’t as good as their record. It’s quite a record, though. 25-5, as a Big East team, with nonconference wins over Wisconsin and Texas Tech and Vermont. Strong offensively, middling on defense. Ed Cooley remains really cool.
#13 South Dakota State: The Jackrabbits live up to their name. They run the floor, they score efficiently, their defense is terrible. Really fun. Played in games where at least one team reached 90 points fourteen times this year. Also went undefeated in the Summit League, which is fairly impressive.
#6 LSU: LSU just fired Will Wade after the NCAA told them what all they were charging him with. Were he still the coach, we’d be talking about them as a great defensive team with enough game changers to potentially still figure things out, at least for a game at a time, on offense. Without him, it’s a weird situation. They turn the ball over a lot, which will be a problem against…
#11 Iowa State: …who also turns the ball over a lot. This is going to be ugly. The Cyclones, though, to their credit, have had a great year. Another of those teams who looks worse at times than they actually are due to the mayhem their defense causes. Tons of trouble scoring, but for a team that won two games last year and largely retooled via low-hype transfers? A great year.
#3 Wisconsin: Wisconsin’s closer to Colorado State on luck/close wins than Providence (Providence is in another league on that stuff), but that’s part of their story too. Another part of their story is Johnny Davis, one of the nation’s best scorers but currently a bit banged up. Brad Davison is also still on this team.
#14 Colgate: Awesome shooting team, haven’t lost since January. The Patriot League champions offer little on the defensive end, but they can knock down a boatload of threes. Colgate’s a little liberal arts school in upstate New York, and yes, its name comes from the guy who started the toothpaste company.
#7 USC: A lot like last year’s USC team, just without the really good players. Which is to say, they’re fine. Do some things well, do some things badly, kind of just did what they were supposed to out in a Pac-12 that had a bad time below them.
#10 Miami: Miami just kind of took care of business in the ACC. Competitive all year, good offense, not a great team overall but hard to hate on them. Beat Duke in Durham and almost again in Brooklyn, beat Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, few bad losses. Jim Larrañaga, still got it?
#2 Auburn: Auburn won 22 of their first 23 games and just five of their last nine, and they were the same team the whole time. They’re good, not great, could definitely make a run but could also flame out. Walker Kessler (UNC transfer) blocks a ton of shots. Bruce Pearl’s their coach.
#15 Jacksonville State: The Gamecocks, from one of the northern corners of Alabama (I always forget which one) are great shooters and don’t do anything else too noteworthy. Anti-climactic, but then again…
***
That ended up being longer than we expected. I guess one little thing about each of 68 teams turns into a lot of things. Probably could’ve kept it tighter in the South and Midwest, but oh well. Here we all are.
I’ll have picks out…tomorrow, I think, for those curious, both for this and the NIT. Follow or fade or disregard entirely. It’s up to you.
