This Sweet 16 looks like the best one ever on paper

The only thing good about having no true first weekend Cinderella? You get a Sweet 16 that on paper looks like it might be the best ever.

There’s an annual March debate about what constitutes the perfect NCAA tournament. Some will say you have to say at least one Cinderella playing its way to the Final Four. Others contend it’s all about the buzzer-beaters, regardless of who’s making them.

For the segment of the population that believes the “madness” of the first weekend of the Big Dance should be muted in order to ensure titanic battles between powerhouse teams during the second weekend and then, ultimately, the Final Four — the 2019 NCAA tournament has been near-perfection.

For just the second time the expansion of the tournament, all 12 top three seeds have made it through the first weekend unscathed. It’s also just the second time in the last 23 years that the eight top two seeds have gone a perfect 16-0 through two rounds. Betting favorites were a perfect 16-0 in the second round — the first time in tournament history that’s ever happened — and the only upset in terms of seeding was 5-seed Auburn taking down fourth-seeded Kansas.

The eeriest thing about the current layout of the tournament is that is mirrors exactly what we saw from the 2009 Sweet 16, the only other year where all 12 top three seeds survived the opening weekend:

Four No. 1 seeds

Four No. 2 seeds

Four No. 3 seeds

One No. 5 seed

One No. 12 seed (both times a traditional Pac-12 power)

The result of that tournament — which was also the only other tournament besides the current one to have three No. 1 seeds from the same conference — was a star-studded Final Four that included top seeds North Carolina and Connecticut, and 2-seeds Villanova and Michigan State. The Tar Heels eventually topped the Spartans (with relative ease) to win the national title.

Regardless of how next weekend plays out, it’s virtually impossible that 2019 will fail to produce a Final Four with as much star power as the one a decade ago.

Fourteen of the 16 teams remaining are from indisputably power conferences (this isn’t the place for that debate, AAC), and they’re all names the average sports fan would be able to recognize and associate with success. Even the only double-digit seed left standing, No. 12 Oregon, is a team loaded with talent that began the year ranked No. 14 in the preseason AP poll. It’s also worth mentioning that Dana Altman and the Ducks played their way to the Final Four just two years ago.

As for the other two teams, it’s pretty impossible to squeeze either one of them into the “plucky underdog” narrative box either. Gonzaga is a No. 1 seed that played for the national title two years ago and wore out the “is this the year we stop referring to them as a mid-major?” before the end of the last decade. Houston is in the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1984, but the Cougars are a 3-seed with a 33-3 record, a well-known head coach, a big city location, and a history — although we’re 35 years removed from it — that includes three straight trips to the Final Four and back-to-back national title game appearances.

So we’ve established that various shades of blue blood is coursing through the veins of all these programs, which is nice. The more important matter when it comes to the week ahead is that the quality of play should be of the highest degree possible.

The top 14 teams in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings are all alive and well in their pursuit of the national title. LSU sits at a respectable No. 19, and Oregon, winner of 10 straight, is No. 28.

Gonzaga, which has been arguably the most impressive 1-seed in the tournament so far, is going to play a remarkably skilled Florida State team whose only losses over the last two months are at North Carolina and to Duke in the ACC title game. Texas Tech and Michigan might be the two best defensive teams in the tournament and they’re going to square off. North Carolina-Auburn has the potential to finish with a final score of 91-90. LSU has all the talent in the world but no head coach, and now they have to face a team with a coach for being one of the greatest ever in the NCAA tournament. Duke and Virginia Tech are playing a rematch of a classic regular season game, only now both teams are missing the key piece who was out for round one.

This is the benefit of a “boring” first weekend. While it would be fun to have a UC Irvine or a Murray State still dancing in the Sweet 16, history says those teams would have been less likely to provide us with the quality games that are set up to go down on Thursday and Friday nights. When the stage gets bigger and the lights get brighter, you want to see the most familiar names and faces in college basketball still chasing the sport’s ultimate goal. That’s exactly what we’re going to get for the next two weeks.

Learning to appreciate delayed gratification is a skill, one this March is helping us all attain.

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