The NCAA tournament is our country's most captivating sporting event. It's also quite easily the cruelest. Ask Villanova.
The Wildcats were thoroughly dominant over the course of a 34-game regular season, losing just twice and earning a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. They demolished poor Lafayette 93-52 in their tourney opener. NC State, by contrast, lost 13 times, landed a No. 8 seed and was fortunate to survive its first game against LSU.
On Saturday, Villanova ran into a physically superior opponent. And Villanova forgot how to shoot for about 37 minutes. As a result, NC State is moving on to the Sweet 16 following its 71-68 upset victory while Villanova's vastly successful season as a whole abruptly ended in bitterly disappointing perspective.
Just how cruel is March? Next Thursday the Wildcats will sit at home and watch as a Xavier team it finished seven games ahead of in the Big East standings and beat three times gets to keep playing. They will also now live for at least a year with a harsh but unavoidable label among college hoops followers: Fraud.
Jay Wright's program has won a combined 62 games over the past two seasons but failed to make it past the Round of 32 in either. NC State's impressive performance against the Wildcats plays right into the hands of the many critics who felt all season that star-less Villanova – and by extension its conference – is overrated. And it's a nice feather in the cap of the ACC.
The RPI, KenPom and Sagarin all rated the Big East a stronger conference than the ACC this season. So how then did the ACC's sixth-place team take down the Big East's runaway champion Saturday?
Well, for one thing, the five teams that finished ahead of NC State are all top four seeds in this tournament. Furthermore, no one has ever disputed NC State's talent level. The Wolfpack were good enough to beat Duke, North Carolina and Louisville this season. But they were also erratic enough to lose to Wofford, Wake Forest and Boston College.
Good NC State showed up in a big way Saturday, most notably up front, where 6-foot-8 Lennard Freeman (11 points, 12 rebounds) and 6-8 Abdul-Malik Abu (13 points, 12 boards) repeatedly beat their Villanova counterparts to the glass. And notoriously streaky Trevor Lacey (17 points) repeatedly hit big shots.
Conversely, there's no overstating just how uncharacteristically cold the Wildcats were from the field. Their field goal percentage was down in the 20s for most of the night, and they hit just 6 of 23 three-point tries prior to Darrun Hilliard's crazy last-minute trifecta that allowed Villanova to cut a seven-point deficit with 1:45 left to one, 69-68, in the last three seconds. It was too late.
Say this about NC State coach Mark Gottfried: His teams seem to play better in the tourney than they do during the regular season. In 2004, he led an Alabama team that went 8-8 in SEC play to the Elite Eight. In 2012, his first NC State team lost 12 regular-season games but reached the Sweet 16 as a No. 11 seed.
Wright, meanwhile, has had the opposite problem. Since reaching the Final Four in 2009, Villanova has failed to make it out of the first weekend in five tourney appearances. This after reaching a Final Four, an Elite Eight and two Sweet 16s from 2005 to 2009. His program couldn't be in much better shape, but its March disappearing acts obscure its success.
Finally, the Wildcats' loss opens up some interesting possibilities going forward in the East Region. Virginia, itself an aspiring No. 1 seed heading into Selection Sunday, is next in line, but the No. 2 seed Cavaliers face a similarly challenging Round of 32 matchup with Michigan State. Could this be the quadrant of the bracket that completely implodes? NC State's next foe will be either fellow ACC member Louisville or trendy sleeper pick Northern Iowa.
But the Sweet 16 will not include Hilliard, Ryan Arcidiacono or the rest of a 33-3 Villanova team. The Wildcats had a tremendous season for which they'll now get unfairly little credit nationally.
Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.
