Every team enters the NCAA Tournament with national championship aspirations. But only six teams have what it takes to cut down the nets.
There is no perfect recipe for predicting which team will cut down the nets in San Antonio in three weeks. However, some notable trends can serve as a guide.
For instance, since the bracket expanded to 64 teams in 1985, every national champion has reached at least the semifinals of their conference tournament. All but two title winners in the analytics era (since 1999) have ranked top 40 in adjusted offensive efficiency and top 25 in adjusted defensive efficiency. The lone exceptions were the 2011 and 2014 UConn squads.
Those criteria rule out a few of this year’s high seeds right off the bat.
St. John’s, as good of a story as it has been this season, does not meet the offensive threshold because of its poor perimeter shooting. Meanwhile, others such as Alabama and Texas Tech (among others) are not up to snuff defensively. There are a few other teams that do fit the base criteria, but that I simply don’t think have shown the ability or consistency to avoid a slip-up — especially considering how strong the teams at the top of the sport have been.
What we’re left with is six teams — the only six teams — capable of winning it all.
Remember, this is not a list of the teams I think will make the Final Four, or the only teams that can make long runs. These are the teams that are built to win this year’s national championship, and they are listed in order of my confidence in their ability to accomplish that goal.
Some may flame out quickly, but one of these squads will soon be on top of the world.
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Florida Gators
Florida is a buzzsaw, plain and simple.
The Gators haven’t just beaten a lot of really good teams, they have dominated and controlled the action in those games. It started when Florida hosted Tennessee and won by 30 points. They later went and beat Auburn on the road, leading by as many as 21. Victories over Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Alabama all went that way, too.
There just aren’t many flaws with this team on paper. Guard play is essential in March, and Florida has the best guard trio in the country in Walter Clayton Jr., Alijah Martin and Will Richard. The Gators are incredibly strong inside, too, with a versatile four-man frontcourt rotation led by projected first-round pick Alex Condon. Head coach Todd Golden’s rotation goes nine deep without much drop-off.
Two of Florida’s four losses — at Kentucky and at Tennessee — are excusable. Losing at home to Missouri and at Georgia are less forgivable for a team of this caliber, and both of those happened because the Gators got off to really slow starts. Florida nearly came back and won both games, but this team must be careful to not dig itself early holes in NCAA Tournament games.
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