ouch

Some thoughts on the upset.
Naturally I'm referring to Washington crushing New Mexico, as I expected. St Mary's beating Villanova wasn't much of a shocker either (every time I picked SMU I had them beating Nova). Kansas is the head scratch-er. For the moment it only killed about half of my brackets and I anticipate still comfortably beating the President.

The last time the #1 overall seed lost in the second round was 2004. However Kentucky that year was somewhere around the 8-10th best team in the country on the computers (UConn vs Duke in the Final Four was essentially the title game). Kansas basically is a coin flip over Duke to be the best team in the country, by almost every computer rating system used. There is no contest here; this is a much bigger upset as a result. Even though UNI is probably a better team than UAB was at the time, it's just a way better team than Kentucky was losing way too early. The oddity to me is that Kentucky of '04 was picked on roughly the same number of brackets as Kansas this year (I picked UConn in 2004 AND pegged them over Georgia Tech and basically ignored Kentucky, usually had them losing to Kansas or Tech).

On the game itself, Sharron Collins did pretty much what he has done in every game they've struggled in all year, shot terribly and turned the ball over too much. I'm also not sure why they didn't try pressing sooner. UNI just didn't seem to be able to handle that pressure at all and doubled their turnovers in the final 4-5 minutes from the entire game. Kansas did seem to be missing a lot of open shots in the second half, but in the first, they were pressing too hard and rushing shots, which is worse.

This upset improves the possibility of Kentucky being the champ to about 8% from 5%. I still see Duke, Syracuse, Ohio State and Kansas State coming ahead of them. The reason is that Kentucky will have to beat, more than likely, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Duke just to get to the final, plus one of the Syracuse, Ohio St, Kansas St trio in that final. All of these are teams rated roughly equal or, in Duke's case, well ahead of Kentucky. Kentucky has played 0 teams of their own caliber all year, or even of top 25 caliber. This is also not a good sign. They will require a lot of upsets to improve their chances, and even here they're in bad shape from here on out. Missouri, Washington, possibly even Cornell are better than most of the teams they have played all year and teams like Baylor are lurking out there as possible final four opponents as well (yet another rough equal and probably the only team as tall and athletic as Kentucky). I'm just not sure what this 20-25% of the "betting" public is seeing in these guys. Other than a hatred of Duke?