No matter the sport, championships bring the game's history to the fore. It's particularly thick in college basketball, whose de facto theme song, the iconic "One Shining Moment", is an annual exercise in nostalgia.
The NCAA men's basketball tournament will soon tip off and generate more of those moments, but there are plenty of conversations to tide us over in the meantime. The topic that's consuming everyone now is tournament positioning, particularly whether a given team will make the field and, if it does, what seed it might receive. That's a game within a game, one that can be addressed from a number of angles, including whether teams were "snubbed" by the selection committee.
Usually, a snubbed team didn't make the tournament despite possibly having a more credible case than purportedly less qualified teams that got the nod instead. But there's another variation of the snub game: teams that got a raw deal at the top line.
Let's take a look at the five biggest No. 1 seed snubs in March Madness history, starting with the most recent example.
Beware the specter of recency bias bias. That's not a typo. Put another way, just because it happened recently doesn't mean it's not an all-time example. This is certainly the case for the 2015-16 Michigan State Spartans.
True, Michigan State only finished 12th in RPI that season (NCAA Evaluation Tool rankings didn't begin until 2018). But their finish to the season—the one that carried them to No. 2 in the final Associated Press rankings—included a nine-game win streak and wins over No. 18 Maryland and No. 13 Purdue to grab the Big Ten tournament title. On Selection Sunday, the Spartans were 29-5 with an ugly loss to Nebraska and other midwinter missteps seemingly in the rearview.
That's especially true compared with Virginia, the team that pundits believed stole the seed that rightfully belonged in East Lansing.
Michigan State was hurt by a relatively down year in the Big Ten. Virginia had two more games against ranked opponents than Michigan State, going 7-2 in nine contests. Still, the Spartans went 5-2 in their ranked matchups, including a win over No. 4 Kansas, and both of UVA's losses in this category came in the final few weeks of the season. Virginia also had some unsightly defeats, including at George Washington.
Never mind that Michigan State went on to embarrass itself in the first round in a jaw-dropping loss to No. 15 Middle Tennessee. If the selection committee couldn't consider that information when they made their decision, neither should we when evaluating it. Based on their position on Selection Sunday, it was an understandable shock when the Spartans got frozen out.
Are you familiar with the concept of a makeup call?
Virginia may have gotten a big one in 2016.
The Cavaliers got the nod over a more deserving Michigan State team, but that might have been a makeup call for the ages, designed to compensate (overcompensate?) for this beauty one season prior.
Tony Bennett and company were still new on the national landscape and seemed to lose the faceoff with not one but two less deserving teams with larger brand recognition: Duke and Wisconsin.
Respectively, the Badgers, Blue Devils and Cavaliers finished fourth, sixth and seventh in RPI, so there wasn't much separation. KenPom.com's strength of schedule ranking points to a huge disadvantage for Virginia, which sat 32nd while the other two were top-five.
And yet, there's a but. Virginia won the ACC regular-season title, finishing with a 28-2 record. Duke won neither the regular-season crown nor the ACC tournament (both teams made the semis) and took some bad in-conference beats to NC State and Miami (32nd and 41st in KenPom's adjusted rankings that year), while Virginia had no such letdowns.
Wisconsin's situation was a little different, as it rode a wave of emotion that came with its Big Ten tournament march behind Frank Kaminsky, Sam Dekker and the rest of that memorable squad. The Badgers' receipt of a No. 1 seed was fun, but it wasn't right. Lost in the aftermath of their tournament win was a 28-3 regular season that included an inexcusable loss in January to Rutgers. It was the last game Rutgers would win that season (it ended on a 15-game losing streak to finish 10-22).
Virginia may not have had as many big chances as Wisconsin, but it did a better job with the hand it was dealt, never suffering a loss nearly as bad as that one.
In the 2000 tournament, the Iowa State Cyclones, who ultimately grabbed a No. 2 seed, were clearly better than one of the No. 1 seeds: the Stanford Cardinal.
Iowa State closed out the regular season with a 26-4 record and a Big 12 title. It then won the conference tournament with consecutive victories over ranked opponents in Oklahoma State and Oklahoma.
The Cyclones also went 6-2 against ranked opponents, including its conference tournament wins. One of those came to then-No. 1 Cincinnati, a juggernaut that seemed destined for the title until Kenyon Martin broke his leg.
Stanford finished a fine and dandy 26-3. The Cardinal played five games against ranked opponents, finishing 3-2. But the edge in RPI goes to Iowa State, which finished sixth while Stanford finished ninth. You simply can't explain this one.
Yes, Utah finished the 1998-99 season 18th in RPI—not so great. But recall that one metric doesn't get it done, especially not in the late 1990s.
The Utes, led by future NBA regulars Andre Miller and Hanno Mottola, ranked sixth in the final AP poll of the regular season. They went 27-4 and finished the season on a 22-game win streak that encompassed Western Athletic Conference regular-season and tournament championships. They went 3-1 against ranked opponents at a time when most big schools were still too disdainful—or frightened—to give mid-major programs like Utah the time of day.
Meanwhile, the Auburn Tigers, who grabbed a No. 1 seed, reached Selection Sunday at 27-3 after being bounced out of the SEC tournament semifinals by then-No. 14 Kentucky. That put the Tigers at 1-2 on the season against ranked opponents. They were sixth in RPI but competed in a conference that was a little overinflated. Yes, the SEC did send six teams to the dance, but two of those teams (Mississippi State and Mississippi) had double-digit losses, so they weren't quite the powerhouse a quick look at the numbers might indicate.
Even so, no one is going to argue that the WAC was anywhere close to the SEC. But it's closer than it might seem. And even if it wasn't, Utah clearly did more with the chances it got.
The year Michigan State won the national title with Magic Johnson, the Spartans weren't even a No. 1 seed.
One of those honors went to UCLA, which went 23-4 in winning the Pac-10. The Bruins finished No. 2 in the final AP poll. However, they only played two games against ranked opponents, finishing 1-1.
By contrast, Michigan State finished 21-6, won the Big Ten and finished No. 3 in the final AP poll.
The big difference between these two is ranked opponents. The Spartans played six games against ranked opponents, going 4-2 in that category.
RPI—much less NET—doesn't go back this far, but UCLA is clearly on the wrong side of history. UCLA was still enjoying the John Wooden glow, an extremely strong and popular program not far removed from the magical Wooden years, including the run of 10 title seasons between 1963 and 1975.
The appeal of the Bruins must have been like Duke squared in those selection rooms.