With each having one player on the AP All-America first team, North Carolina and Oklahoma are the clear Final Four favorites.
There’s a lot of ways to look at sports. Analytics are all the rage and history tends to repeat itself, as it did to get the North Carolina Tar Heels to the Final Four in the first place.
History tends to unfold as it has in the past pic.twitter.com/lBM4ZsxhyZ
— Nathan Giese (@NathanGiese) March 28, 2016
Sometimes fate plays a key role in sports, especially in college basketball. It’s the same reason why many are so fixated on the concept of needing a surefire first-round NBA pick to win the national championship.
Except the same concept can be applied to a number of different scenarios, including the Sports Illustrated cover curse. On Tuesday, SI unveiled its Final Four cover, which features Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield, who has graced the cover twice in the last three weeks now.
Given this information, plus both Brice Johnson (two weeks ago) and Marcus Paige (a cover that never was) being on the cover of SI and the recent history of the cover curse, Villanova and Syracuse are now the clear favorites to finish off the Final Four and win the who dang thing.
But another development on Tuesday has completely taken the momentum away from those two old Big East members and thrown it right back in favor of the two heavy hitters in Houston, North Carolina and Oklahoma.
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The Associated Press released its All-American teams on Tuesday and two players will who take the stage at the Final Four were named first teamers in Hield (Oklahoma) and Johnson (UNC). No players from Villanova or Syracuse made the cut.
Why is this significant? Because each of the last seven national champions had an All-American honoree on the roster. This has also occurred in 14 of the last 16 years (since 2000). The two outliers on the list were Kansas in 2008 and the first of Florida’s back-to-back title efforts in 2006.
Right away, this should signify that the Tar Heels and the Sooners are now the likely winners of the title thanks to Johnson and Hield.
However, there’s something that swings this even more in North Carolina’s favor.
Hield is expected to be named the Wooden Award winner as the nation’s top player as well as a number of other NPOY awards, like CBSSports.com’s award, also released on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, being rewarded as the nation’s top player is often the kiss of death for a team hoping to win a national championship.
Since 2000, there have been nine first-team All-Americans on the national championship team, including two for the 2001 Duke Blue Devils title team in Shane Battier and Jay Williams. However, of these nine first-teamers to win titles, only two have been named NPOY in Battier (2001) and Anthony Davis (2012).
Consider the information: this millennium, there have only been two instances where the NPOY won a national championship while there are only two times a team without an all-american has won the title.
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What does this mean? It essentially means you can eliminate Oklahoma from the Final Four right now, because history does not favor the team with the award winning player or the team that’s had that player featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated multiple times in a month.
Because of Johnson’s inclusion on the the AP all-america team, Hield’s double involvement with the AP and the NPOY race and Villanova and Syracuse’s lack of All-Americans, look for the Tar Heels to enter the Final Four as the favorites for much more than statistical reasons.