2015 NCAA Tournament: Reasons to Root for or Against Each Team in the Final Four
Between the players, coaches and teams that will be on display in Indianapolis on Saturday night, the 2015 NCAA men's basketball Final Four might as well be an All-Star Weekend of college hoops.
But who should you root for?
If you're like most of the country, your bracket is busted and both your alma mater and the school you grew up rooting for have already been eliminated from the tournament. You keep hearing that this is supposed to be one of the best Final Fours in recent memory, but you're having some difficulty deciding which team is most worthy of a three-day pass to your allegiance.
You've come to the right place, because we've laid out the case on why you should root for and against each of the remaining teams.
If you love watching history and don't mind rooting for a coach a lot of people despise, welcome to the BBNB (Big Blue Nation Bandwagon). If you love to pull for the underdog no matter the damage it does to the value of the regular season, on Sparta! If you love quality fundamentals regardless of the pace, you'll be pulling for the Badgers.
By the time you're done reading, you'll hopefully know which color face paint you need to buy for this weekend.
The Case for Kentucky
1 of 8
Kentucky is on the brink of doing something we may never witness again.
That isn't hyperbole.
Thanks to Wichita State's 35-0 start to last season and Kentucky's 38-0 start to this one, we've grown more than a little desensitized to just how difficult of a task it is.
Prior to Wichita State, the last team to win its first 30 games of the year was Jerry Tarkanian's UNLV Runnin' Rebels during the 1990-91 season. Before that, it was Larry Bird's Indiana State team in 1978-79. And they both failed to finish the job, losing in the Final Four and national championship, respectively.
The Shockers were the first team to win their first 35 games of the year, and we spent most of the season discounting the accomplishment by pointing out their abysmal strength of schedule.
So the idea of a power conference team going 40-0 was supposed to be inconceivable. We scoffed at the Kentucky fans who were printing "40-0" t-shirts a few years ago and spent the first half of this season with plenty of "experts" telling us why the Wildcats won't go undefeated.
Yet here we are with just two games standing between Kentucky and perfection.
If the Wildcats played dirty, cocky or (insert adjective you use to describe teams you don't like), we could absolutely understand your desire to see them fail.
But they don't. They share the ball on offense and sell out on every defensive possession. There's not an ounce of selfishness or cockiness in their bones. If you squint just enough, you might think you're watching a McDonald's All-American variation of those Butler teams Brad Stevens led to consecutive title games a few years ago.
For crying out loud, the guys spend their free time playing the Nintendo 64 version of Super Smash Bros. Unless you're a lifelong fan of Duke, Michigan State or Wisconsin, how can you rationalize rooting against Kentucky?
The Case Against Kentucky
2 of 8
Kentucky's players are easy to root for, but it might be even easier to root against the Wildcats because of head coach John Calipari.
No matter how many philanthropic things Calipari does in his life, he is viewed by many as a sleazeball. He's the guy who cheated at Massachusetts and Memphis. He's the coach who broke college basketball as we know it with his "succeed and proceed" take on the one-and-done epidemic.
In Lexington, he's a legend, and no one can ever take away from what he has accomplished with four Final Four appearances in five years. Only three teams in history have ever won 38 games in a season, and he has coached all of them (2007-08 Memphis, 2011-12 Kentucky and 2014-15 Kentucky).
Outside of Lexington, though, the skeptics are merely wondering how much longer it will be before Kentucky has to vacate some of those achievements.
Where have we heard this before? Do you have any recollection of an undefeated team with a widely scorned coach who has been accused of cheating?
Basically, if you were rooting against the 18-0 New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, you're probably rooting against Kentucky in the 2015 Final Four. You're not opposed to the idea of a team going 40-0; you're just opposed to the idea of this team with this coach going 40-0.
The Case for Duke
3 of 8
Duke is simply fun to watch.
Jahlil Okafor arrived on campus with one of the most polished big-man games we have ever seen in college hoops. Similarly, Tyus Jones showed up ready and willing to dominate as Duke's point guard—annually one of the most polarizing positions in the entire sport.
Justise Winslow kind of disappeared for a few weeks in the middle of the season while playing through a fractured rib, but he has blossomed into one of the most unstoppable forwards in the country.
It's not just the freshmen, either. Quinn Cook has reinvented himself as a senior, willfully and skillfully moving over to shooting guard to make room for Jones. His veteran leadership and swagger have been incalculably crucial to Duke's development and success. Even juniors Amile Jefferson and Marshall Plumlee have served as spark plugs off the bench.
In a season where things like "slow pace" and "adjusted defensive efficiency" were uttered and written over and over again, Duke has been a breath of fresh air. The Blue Devils score efficiently, defend adequately and simply look better than most doing it.
Furthermore, forced to choose between Duke and Kentucky, the Blue Devils are the lesser of two evils. They stopped UNLV from going undefeated, and it would be something if they were the team to put an end to Kentucky's quest for perfection.
The Case Against Duke
4 of 8
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight.
Three decades ago, Mike Krzyzewski was an up-and-coming coach for a team that was easy to root for. Duke failed to reach the Sweet 16 in his first five seasons before finally breaking through in 1986 to reach the national championship game. By the time the Blue Devils won their first title in 1991—knocking off undefeated UNLV along the way—they needed multiple bandwagons to carry all their fans.
But now we're sick of him/them.
This is Coach K's 12th Final Four in the past 30 years. He got his 1,000th career win at the college level earlier this season. He has even been the head coach of the U.S. men's national team for the past decade.
Enough is enough.
Perhaps worst of all, Krzyzewski is just as much on the one-and-done train as John Calipari is. Should Duke and Kentucky meet in the national championship, the Blue Devils will be starting more freshmen than the Wildcats. He had Jabari Parker last year and he got Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow this year.
It's not fair. Rooting for Duke is like rooting for Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life.
Plain and simple: When in the past 20 years has anyone ever needed a reason to root against Duke? The reason to root against the Blue Devils is because it still says "Duke" on the front of their jerseys.
The Case for Wisconsin
5 of 8
The reason to root for Wisconsin is twofold.
First off, the Badgers play unbelievably fundamental basketball. Their adjusted offensive efficiency is off the charts because they move the ball well, always take high-percentage shots and almost never commit turnovers. Head coach Bo Ryan's teams are always fundamentalists, but this year's group is darn near flawless. A lot of coaches would love to get something similar out of their players.
But despite functioning like a well-oiled machine on the court, these players are anything but robotic off it. Led by Frank Kaminsky, the Badgers are just a bunch of goobers that seem like they would be a ton of fun to hang out with.
Jeff Arnold wrote about Kaminsky for the New York Times a few weeks ago:
"Kaminsky (is) the self-described goofball who still remembers the combination of his high school locker (1-17-49) and who tried to catch falling confetti on his tongue like a 7-foot-tall kid seeing snow for the first time after Wisconsin’s Big Ten tournament championship victory. ... At heart, Kaminsky is a big kid who would stay at Wisconsin if he could. He is the kid who celebrated Wisconsin’s Big Ten tournament title and chronicled every moment with a GoPro video camera strapped to his chest.
"
Rooting against Wisconsin is basically the equivalent of rooting against fun. Unless you're reading this from your porch while reminding the whippersnappers from next door to get off your lawn, you should probably be pulling for the Badgers.
The Case Against Wisconsin
6 of 8
Despite boasting the most efficient offense in more than a decade, Wisconsin ranks just 49th in the country in points per game.
This is because Bo Ryan's teams have been consistently playing at one of the slowest tempos in the country since he became the head coach in 2001.
With teams like Wisconsin, Virginia and Northern Iowa having so much success this season, the pace of college basketball has become a major point of discussion over the past several months. The NCAA even experimented with a shorter shot clock and a wider block/charge arc in the NIT, CIT and CBI tournaments in advance of offseason discussions that may well result in some wholesale rule changes.
And with good reason. According to Statsheet.com, the average game during the 1997-98 season featured 141.54 possessions. Aside from a slight uptick last year—thanks to the adjusted block/charge rule and emphasis on hand checking that went flying out the window about two months into the season—that number has been steadily declining for nearly two decades, resulting in this year's 130.97 possessions per game.
The irony is that offenses are more efficient than ever. Using that same data from Statsheet.com, we see teams are averaging 1.027 points per possession as opposed to 1.005 in 1997-98. But scoring is down 5.4 percent because the pace of play has slowed by 7.5 percent.
Though the individual players are goofy and fun to watch, to root for Wisconsin is to root for a further decline in the pace of play.
It's one thing for the Badgers to be in back-to-back Final Fours, but if they win a national championship, you better believe more teams will be following their model—especially since the 2009 North Carolina Tar Heels are the only team in the last nine years to win a national championship while playing at an adjusted tempo that ranked among the 100 fastest in their respective season.
The Case for Michigan State
7 of 8
It's an extremely bizarre thing to say about a team that has gone to seven of the last 17 Final Fours and each of the last 18 NCAA tournaments, but don't you have to root for the Spartans because they're the underdogs?
Duke, Kentucky and Wisconsin each have their nice little stories and reasons to root for them. But why align yourself with a No. 1 seed when you can root for a No. 7 seed to win a national championship for a second consecutive season?
Michigan State represents everything we love about Cinderella stories in March: A team that struggled for most of the season buckles down on defense and has a couple of shooters get hot to lead a charismatic coach to a series of consecutive upsets.
The only difference is that this particular Cinderella has already been to the ball about a million times. But what has happened over the past two decades doesn't change the fact that the Spartans probably shouldn't be here this year.
Through the start of the Big Ten tournament, they had as many wins over RPI Top 50 teams as they had losses to teams outside the RPI Top 100—two of each. All six of their best wins of the season have come in the past three weeks. Their slow start to the season was the impetus for all those "Down year for the Big Ten" pieces that were written, yet the Spartans helped the Big Ten represent 50 percent of the Final Four.
Just getting to this point is incredible enough, but it would be pretty amazing if Michigan State won two more games against two of the best teams in the country.
The Case Against Michigan State
8 of 8
The reason to root for Michigan State is simultaneously the reason to root against it.
Upsets and Cinderella stories are fun, but the last few rounds of the tournament are supposed to be reserved for the big dogs. There's a reason we build up early-season games between Duke and Wisconsin, Kentucky and Kansas, Arizona and Gonzaga, etc. as potential national championship or Final Four previews. That's what we all want to see at the end of the season.
Not only would Duke vs. Kentucky or Duke vs. Wisconsin be a ratings bonanza for CBS on Monday night, but it would be the perfect capstone to a season in which there were six or seven teams that were clearly better than the rest of the country.
Anything short of a national championship game between two of those teams would be a letdown, and it would add to the narrative that the regular season really doesn't matter in college basketball.
It was one thing when Connecticut went on its magical run last season. The Huskies had eight losses, but they had some extremely good wins during the season and suffered most of those losses against quality teams.
It would be another thing entirely if Michigan State swoops in to win it all with nary an outstanding regular-season win and a total of 11 losses—including bad ones to Texas Southern, Nebraska and Minnesota.
It's already hard enough to get casual fans to care about incredible nonconference pairings in November and December. Selling the importance of regular-season games would be nearly impossible if Michigan State wins it all just over three months after losing a home game to a team from the SWAC.
Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.
.jpg?w=600 "Titans President Steps Down")
.jpg?w=600 "Best NFL Free Agents")
