NCAA College Basketball Tournament - round of 32, day 2

NCAA College Basketball Tournament - round of 32, day 2

Two of the #2 seeds fell.

#2 Virginia lost to #7 Michigan State, and that was an upset, but people have underestimated Michigan State. They are mighty good. They fought Wisconsin to a standstill last week before collapsing in OT.

#2 Kansas fell to #7 Wichita State in an intrastate match-up that never happens during the regular season (they last played in 1993). That was not really an upset in the sense that the oddsmakers had the game dead even. Kansas had shown plenty of vulnerability during the season. This was their ninth loss, which is a helluva lot for a number two seed, and one of those losses was a severe 77-52 ass-kicking by lowly Temple.

With Dayton out of the picture, there is only one team left from the bottom of the brackets - #11 UCLA. That means there is no real Cinderella team in the group. UCLA has 11 national championships, more than any other team, more even than Kentucky, so the basketball world is not going to rally around them as if they were Robert Morris. Moreover, underdogs are supposed to be lovable, but nobody really seemed to like UCLA in the first place, and that situation was exacerbated by their tainted victory in the first round.

The new leader in the ESPN challenge has all of the correct teams in the sweet 16. Impressive! He got two wrong in the first round, but the winners he failed to predict (Georgia State and UAB) beat teams that he had slated to lose in the following round. When those two teams went down to defeat, he got back on track.