Putting UConn's Run in Perspective

Many have said that Connecticut's run to the Big East title -- five wins in five nights in the nation's toughest conference -- was harder than winning the NCAA Tournament. As regards to timing, at least, that's definitely true -- whoever wins this thing will have their six (or seven) games spread over three weeks.

What about substantively? It's certainly possible that the road to Houston will be no tougher for the Huskies than the one that brought them the Big East trophy.

Throwing away DePaul -- the hapless Blue Demons are no match for even UConn's first round opponent, the Patriot League-champion Bucknell Bison -- UConn beat Georgetown, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, and Louisville at Madison Square Garden.

The Hoyas are a six seed in the Big Dance; the Panthers are a one; the Orange, a three; the Cardinals, a four. UConn's a three-seed, so if the tournament goes according to chalk (it never does, but for purposes of this little exercise, let's assume it does), UConn would need to beat a six (Cincinnati, who they beat on the road at the end of February), a two (San Diego State) and two ones (Duke and Ohio State) in addition to Bucknell to reach the national championship game. Throw in an upset here or there, though, and it could be really comparable.

Of course, UConn is by no means a lock to win even their first round game. They are the classic example of a team that over-achieves late in the season, is everyone's "hot" pick to go to the Final Four, then bows out in an early round (Georgetown last year is actually a pretty good example of this).

Political blogger Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com recently wrote a post about similar teams. He used UConn's Big East foe Notre Dame as an example of a team that received no attention at the beginning of the year but that has played its way to a very good seed in this year's tournament. He could easily have used Connecticut as his example; like Notre Dame, the Huskies were unranked to start the season (though they did receive eight votes in the preseason poll). Silver looked at 41 teams who had started the season unranked and entered the tournament ranked in the AP top ten, and found that as a group, they under-performed their expectations by a fairly significant margin (the post is interesting; I suggest you check it out for details).

As of this writing, I don't know where UConn will end up in Monday's writer's poll. They're an interesting case, however. They didn't work their way up in the rankings throughout the season like most teams do. Rather, they leapt into the top ten in November after winning the Maui Invitational in November as an unranked team. They got as high as No. 4 before losing to Pittsburgh in late December, and spent most of the rest of the season ranked somewhere in the teens. Two losses to end the regular season put UConn on the verge of slipping out of the top 25 entirely; they started the Big East Tournament ranked 21st.

It's hard to say how their somewhat unique path will affect anything discussed above. On the one hand, they seem to exhibit all the symptoms of one of these early-round upset victims. On the other, they have now twice shown the ability to beat good teams in a tournament situation -- they beat Wichita State, then-No. 2 Michigan State, and then-No. 8 Kentucky in Maui. The X-factor may be Kemba Walker; he's capable of carrying the Huskies by himself against almost anyone. I personally think the draw opens up pretty well for them, but I'm wary of picking them given the history of these kinds of teams.