I am very smug and proud to say that I predicted at this very web site that a 16 seed would beat a 1 seed in “the foreseeable future” just two days before it happened!! 
Unfortunately, I then went on to carefully explain why I thought Virginia was going to win the national championship. Oops!! LOL
Interesting that Virginia is the victim of two of the largest upsets in basketball history:
Chaminade over #1 Virginia in 1982
I guess you could argue which is bigger. The #16 vs #1 has more exposure, but hard to beat a NAIA team beating Ralph Sampson (but I’m a homer)
To be fair, a lot of the top seeds in the tournament underachieved (or were outmatched, unprepared, whatever) this tournament. And MSU’s futility is shared by other prominent programs, like Virginia and Kansas (although they’re obviously still alive…for now).
Wrong. VCU made the Final Four as a First Four team in 2011. This was the first year that they expanded to 68 teams, VCU was also a 11 seed play-in. Prior to that all play-ins were 16 seeds, so obviously no, there had never been one of those to advance past the first round.
Speaking of play-ins, why do they get an 11 seed now? If they have to play to get into the tournament, then they weren’t selected with the original 64 teams, which to me should mean that they always get a 16 seed having been the “worst” teams to squeak in.
Not really. There are still 16-seed play in games too, 2 of each.
The 68 teams are made up of automatic bids to conference winners and then at-large bids. There are 32 automatic bids right now. Figure at least 8-10 of those are “power” conferences where the team is a lock even if they lose their conference championship game. That means there are around ~24 bids that are granted to smaller schools that earned their spot in the dance, but usually are not as well regarded as the “bubble teams”.
There has been a lot of backlash towards effectively punishing the bottom rung of automatic bid teams by making them play on Tuesday in Dayton. For most of those schools the only time they ever get any recognition is when they play on Thursday-Friday of the dance and it’s inherently unfair to diminish these schools simply to squeeze in 4 more power conference teams that kinda but not totally sucked like Arizona St, Syracuse and UCLA.
When the NCAA expanded from 66 to 68 teams they split the difference. Giving 4 16-seeds (aka minor conference automatic bid teams) a play-in and then 4 11-seeds (aka power conference bubble teams) a play-in.
In my opinion all 8 play-in teams should be at-large teams as a rule. If you seed them all at 16, that means the 1-seeds probably get stuck playing a middling power school, sometimes a conference rival, in the first round which will be unpopular. So putting them all at 11-seeds or 12-seeds is probably the right move.
I hadn’t been following the NCAA tournament at all, but when my wife told me UVa had been seeded #1 and lost, my first thought was, “who were they playing, Chaminade?”
At least it wasn’t “While you’re at it, why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?”
A childish question like that one *deserves *a childish answer. Under the circumstances, that answer was diplomatic.
This isnt even the worst upset of a Virginia team. Remember when they lost to Chaminade?