To the sadness and dismay of many basketball fans—including myself—the college basketball season has officially ended with the University of Florida men’s basketball winning the national championship.
March is my favorite time of the year because of the NCAA basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. I love being engulfed with basketball for three weeks straight, and I always look forward to the bracket competition with my family. My grandpa won for the second year in a row, but he only beat me for first place by one point. I’m coming for you, Pa. Watch your back. Love you.
Beef aside, I know lots of viewers, including myself, expected this year’s tournament to bring the madness March is known for—buzzer-beaters, huge upsets and exciting games.
But… did it?
I recently saw one user on Reddit point out how the lack of Cinderella teams made this year’s tournament boring. Cinderella teams are lower-seeded teams who beat the odds and make a deep run in the tournament.
I’ve seen other people online complain about this as well. Cinderella teams are very entertaining to watch and people were complaining about the lack of upsets and how only the higher-seeded teams made it far. I’ve always rooted for the lower-seeded teams.
This year, no seed lower than a three made it to the Elite Eight, and all four one seeds made it to the Final Four. There wasn’t a true Cinderella who made a deep run.
Honestly, I understand where the Reddit commenter is coming from. Watching 11 seed North Carolina State University breeze through power schools like Duke University and Marquette University last year was so fun to watch. When Saint Peter’s University beat the University of Kentucky in the first round in 2022 to begin their run, my basketball teammates and I huddled around my coach’s phone at the end of practice to watch the end of the game. It was awesome.
This year, there wasn’t that Cinderella excitement. I sighed each time I checked a score and saw, yet again, another higher-seeded team was moving on to the next round.
But did I stop watching? Did I find it boring? Not necessarily.
March Madness is a time for individual players to shine, and that’s what I was focused on the most this year in lieu of rooting for Cinderella teams.
Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr. had back-to-back thirty-point games in the Elite Eight and the Final Four, which was the highlight of the tournament for me. He put the team on his back and turned himself into a star.
I realized I had just as much fun watching these stars go all out as I did rooting for a Cinderella team. Watching these players work like a well-oiled machine is so fascinating, and I don’t think we should discredit any of that because they played for a high-seeded team.
While it’s fun to watch the giants of college basketball fall, it’s also fun to watch them shine. After all, there is a reason they’ve been named the best in the country.
