One of my favorite stretches of the year is the third Thursday in March through the Masters tournament. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved the NCAA basketball tournament and all the chaos that ensued. I’m even one of the people who enjoys when the 1 seeds all advance because it means we get great games in the later rounds. The 2025 opening round sucked, let’s talk about why.

This year I bet every underdog money line excluding the one seeds. That strategy resulted in a 20-unit loss over the first two days, not great! As a kid I always assumed the 12 seeds winning in the first round were huge upsets, this year McNees was the biggest underdog winner at +260. Tough to win on the dogs when the big upsets are paying that.

When NIL first came into play, we saw a ton of lower seeds make the later rounds. I felt like those schools were capitalizing on transfers from bigger schools and benefiting from continuity of the same guys playing together for 3-4 years. In 2023, all four teams in the Final Four were ranked as a four seed or below. This year, the one seeds are all so strong it looks like all of them will make the Final Four.

The bigger schools have raided the rosters of the smaller schools, so those small schools don’t have any continuity or any of the star players that they did a few years ago. This is a mess, and we’re going to see fewer and fewer upsets going forward. Even the coaching changes are a mess. Will Wade and Kevin Willard openly taking other jobs while their teams are still playing, are you kidding? What ever happened to an under the table agreement and announcing it after the season is over?

Don’t get me wrong, the last four rounds of the tournament are going to be incredible, and we still have the best teams playing. It just takes a little fun out of it when all 16 1-4 seeds advance to the Sweet 16.  I’m not sure what the solution here is. St Francis will never have the budget that Kentucky has, and it feels like as long as the current rules stay in place, we won’t see another longshot make a deep run. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong this weekend, at this point I just want some games to stay within the spread.