
In a normal year, Auburn would be a 50th percentile Sweet 16 team. In 2019, however, the Tigers rank No. 13 among remaining teams. (Wade Rackley, Auburn Athletics)
We’ve suspected for weeks now that there’s an unusually dense concentration of big swaggering capital-letter Great Team behemoths roaming our hoops landscape in 2018-19. Pick your flavor and choose your boundary line, but, speaking generally, this field’s top 10 or 11 teams together constitute an oligopoly of hoops hegemony the likes of which we don’t often get within the confines of a single season.
Well, it just so happens that all of those teams, every one of them, won two games during the first weekend of the 2019 NCAA tournament. Not to be outdone, so, too, did the tier of teams right below the big guns.
When you put chalk together with behemoths, you get a Sweet 16 that fairly blows its predecessors out of the statistical water.