Avoid Michigan and Fear This Bracket-Busting 12-Seed in 2021 March Madness Tournament

• Gonzaga, Baylor, Michigan, and Illinois are the #1 seeds; why are the Wolverines the least trustworthy?
• Which double-digit seed is going to crash the Sweet 16?
• Sascha Paruk dives deep into two of the NCAA Tournament’s most-fascinating teams

The first round of the 2021 NCAA Tournament starts on Friday, March 19th. Brackets will be due at around noon ET that morning at the latest.

Gonzaga (West Region), Baylor (South), Michigan (East), and Illinois (Mid-West) earned the four #1 seeds. Before advancing all four to the Sweet 16 (and beyond) in your bracket, a word of caution on one member of the quartet that looks more vulnerable than the others.

Michigan Backers Beware

The Michigan Wolverines entered the season rated 15th at KenPom and 12th at Torvik. Juwan Howard had to replace three key pieces from a 2020 group that went a middling 19-12 overall (10-10 Big Ten): Zavier Simpson, John Teske, and David DeJulius.

He did it better than anyone expected and the Wolverines roared out to an 11-0 start, rising as high as #2 in the AP Poll late in the regular season.

Several returning players have taken steps forward and, more importantly, freshman center Hunter Dickinson has played beyond his years. ESPN’s 41st-ranked recruit leads UM in scoring (14.1 PPG), rebounds (7.6 RPG), blocks (1.4 BPG), and field-goal percentage (59.9%). The imposing 7’1  center also shoots 75.8% from the stripe, a great clip for a seven-footer.

His overall performance landed him third in KenPom’s rankings for Big Ten Player of the Year, right behind Luka Garza (Iowa) and Ayo Dosunmu (Illinois), who are likely to finish first and second in National POY voting.

Dickinson is accompanied by a solid supporting cast, most-notably senior forward Isaiah Livers, who was right behind Dickinson at 13.1 PPG and 6.0 RPG.

I say “was” because Livers is out indefinitely with a fractured foot. And that’s where Michigan’s fragility starts to come into focus.

📰 WOLVERINE NEWS 📰

Juwan Howard announced Isaiah Livers will be out indefinitely after an MRI following yesterday's Big Ten Tournament quarterfinal game against Maryland revealed a stress injury to his right foot.

Release | https://t.co/Ty6aFuQbLt#GoBlue 〽️🏀 pic.twitter.com/IQTp6eKKiH

— Michigan Men's Basketball (@umichbball) March 13, 2021

Only six players on the team are averaging more than 11 minutes per game, and Livers topped the list at 31.6 MPG. A 6’7 wing, Livers was dangerous everywhere on the floor, shooting a sublime 43.1% from three on over 120 attempts (five per game).

With Livers sidelined, the Wolverines leaned heavily on Dickinson in the Big Ten semifinals against Ohio State. To his credit, he was nearly perfect, going off for 21 points on 9-14 shooting while grabbing a team-high eight rebounds.

But even with that performance, UM still came up a point short in a 68-67 loss. Livers’ replacement in the starting lineup, 6’8 junior Brandon Johns Jr, was 0-3 from the field and collected all seven of his points from the free-throw line. To date this season, he has averaged just 4.1 points in a little over ten minutes per game.

The list of freshman who have  carried their elder teammates deep into March is relatively short. Only one freshman has made the Final Four All-Tournament Team in the last four editions (Zach Collins, Gonzaga, 2017).

Michigan doesn’t have elite guard play/ball-handling. On offense, they are 49th in the nation in turnover percentage (good not great) and they are down in 83rd in assist rate.

The road ahead starts smoothly. No matter who wins the First Four matchup between Texas Southern (229th at KenPom) and Mount St. Mary’s (219th at KenPom), Michigan will face the worst-rated team in the tournament in the first round.

After that, though, look out. Looming in the second round is either LSU, which owns the fifth-best offense in the country, or St Bonaventure, which won the A10 regular-season and tournament title and has covered the spread in seven of its last eight games.

While no team’s path through the tournament is altogether predictable, if you look at the probable opponents for the #1 seeds in the second, third, and fourth rounds, Michigan has the second-toughest road to the Final Four based on KenPom ratings.

The table below shows the two most-likely opponents for each #1 seed in rounds two through four. The final column is the cumulative total of those opponents’ KenPom ratings, so a lower number represents a tougher schedule.

Potential Second and Third-Round Matchups for #1 Seeds

In the Elite Eight, #2 Alabama would be a nightmare matchup for the Wolverines. The Tide play at a frenetic pace (fifth-fastest in the country) that the down-tempo Wolverines will hate. Only one Big Ten team has a tempo that ranks among the 75-fastest in the nation, and that’s last-place Nebraska.

Alabama’s offense plays at a gear UM hasn’t seen this season, and they also boast a high-pressure defense which is second in the country in efficiency. Six-foot-eight forward Herb Jones is a semifinalist for Naismith Defensive Player of the Year.

One of the common denominators in UM’s three regular-season losses was Dickinson being held in check. He was limited to nine points at Minnesota, six versus Illinois, and 12 at Michigan State (on 40% shooting). If Bama can get Dickinson into foul trouble (he averages 2.5 per game) or force the Wolverines elsewhere, they will have a hard time keeping up.

And even if Dickinson is able to dominate in the post, the Ohio State game offers (limited) evidence that the Livers-less Wolverines still may not have enough.

On the other side of the upset equation, there is a certain double-digit seed that is in a good position to crash the second weekend …

UC Santa Barbara Might Wreck a Lot of Brackets

Have you met West Region #12 seed UC Santa Barbara yet? Let me introduce you to the under-the-radar Gauchos.

The Big West regular-season and tournament champions began the year rated 130th at KenPom and 173rd at Torvik. After going 22-4 (13-3 Big West) – with all four losses coming in true road games against the three best teams on their schedule – UCSB has risen to 69th at KenPom and 76th at Torvik. They are the second-best #12 seed in the tournament according to the analytics, trailing Georgetown (55th at KenPom and 41st at Torvik) but ahead of Oregon State (85th in both ratings) and Winthrop (91st and 98th).

Their competition in the Big West was better than most realize. It was the 15th-strongest conference out of the 31 conferences that played this year. (The Ivy League sat out the entire season.) It finished with four teams in the top 150 at KenPom.

UCSB has decent balance with the 66th-rated offense and 82nd-rated defense, plus a future pro at the point in the form of Big West POY JaQuori McLaughlin (16.2 PPG, 5.2 APG, 3.4 RPG). The biggest concern from a personnel standpoint is that third-leading scorer Ajare Sanni is day-to-day with an ankle injury suffered in UCSB’s 79-63 win over UC Irvine in the Big West title game,

UC Santa Barbara's Ajare Sanni (ankle) is day-to-day, per Joe Pasternack. Suffered the injury Saturday versus UC Irvine. Averages 11.2 PPG. Status for Creighton is TBD.

— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) March 15, 2021

The Gauchos face #5 Creighton in the first round, a team that hasn’t quite met the high-expectations it had coming into the year. The Bluejays are just 3-3 in their last six, including a perplexing 73-48 demolition at the hands of Georgetown in the Big East championship game.

With Marcus Zegarowski at the point, Creighton also has a future pro handling the rock. But Creighton lives and dies by the three, launching 44.3% of their field-goal attempts from beyond the arc (33rd-most in DI). While three-point defense is sometimes derided as random, the Gauchos’ have the 15th-best three-point defense among the 357 DI teams (30.9%). They fight hard to prevent clean looks.

Creighton is also in the midst of some ugliness between head coach/casual racist Greg McDermott and several Bluejay players.

Greg McDermott will coach @BluejayMBB in the @BIGEASTMBB Tourney after being suspended for one game in light of his 'plantation' comments https://t.co/gIIDvU63TO

— Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) March 8, 2021

McDermott was reinstated right before the Big East Tournament. The Bluejays looked cohesive in his first two games back (an 87-56 rout of Butler and a 59-56 win over underrated UConn). But in the finals, they very much did not.

At best, the Bluejays are an extremely-talented question mark right now.

If UCSB takes down Creighton, either #4 Virginia or #13 Ohio will be waiting in the second round.  UVA, currently a seven-point favorite over the Bobcats, is a capable team that does everything pretty well – as long as they’re on the court.

Virginia was forced to withdraw from the ACC Tournament due to positive COVID tests within its team. It’s possible that they don’t meet the testing requirements to participate, not likely, but possible. (Louisville, 54th at KenPom, is the first alternate.) Even if they do get to play, the build-up to the tournament for the Wahoos is not going to be status quo.

Virginia has lost to two teams worse than UCSB this season (San Francisco, 101st; NC State, 73rd) and were blown off the court by Gonzaga and Florida State (23 and 21-point losses, respectively). Santa Barbara would give UVA a stiff test at the best of times.

If the Gauchos get to the Sweet 16, it seems inevitable that they will find #1-overall seed Gonzaga waiting and … yeah … that’s where this story ends.