Final Four Won't Feature A Top Three Seed For The First Time In History
The NCAA Tournament will feature a unique Final Four starting this Saturday.
FAU/San Diego State and UConn/Miami will battle it out to punch tickets to the national title next Monday.
However, unlike most years, not a single one seed made it. In fact, for the first time in NCAA Tournament history, not a single one, two or three seed will be playing in the Final Four.
UConn is a four, SDSU and Miami are fives and FAU, the most unlikely Final Four participant, is a nine seed.
The Final Four should give fans a different vibe and feel this Saturday.
Most of the time, the Final Four is composed of one and two seeds with threes mixed in pretty regularly and then the occasional four or five.
After that, it starts to get pretty rare to catch sixes and lower. For example, only one 10 seed - 2016 Syracuse - has ever reached the Final Four.
FAU is just the third nine seed ever to reach the Final Four, according to USA Today. None have ever advanced to the national title game. That means FAU has a chance to make some serious history Saturday against SDSU.
Will FAU win its Final Four matchup against SDSU? (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
Parity is what makes college basketball great.
Unlike college football, you truly can have endless different outcomes in college basketball. The talent gap between a really good team and a very solid team isn't huge.
Look at how quickly all the one seeds were eliminated. None made it past the Sweet 16. Purdue didn't even make it out of the opening round.
In football, the gap between the 20th best team in America and the best team is massive. It's just not the same in college basketball. One of the reasons why is there are a few hundred really solid recruits in any given year for college basketball and they're all spread out. In football, most of the top talent is concentrated within a dozen or so programs.
There's plenty of examples of smaller schools stacking up on relatively unknown talent and making runs when the guys develop. Butler with Gordon Hayward is the greatest example of this. Butler went to back-to-back national title games with Hayward and Brad Stevens coaching.
Parity makes college basketball great. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
No matter what happens, the national title game will have a mid-major program with the winner of FAU/SDSU advancing.
That's just something that's not even something you could try to imagine in college football.
FAU is a March Madness surprise. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
Make sure to catch the Final Four starting Saturday at 6:09 EST on CBS. SDSU/FAU gets things started and Miami/UConn follows afterwards. No matter how it shakes out, the national title game matchup is going to be awesome.