By the end of an unpredictable, upset-laden regular season in college basketball, six teams had ascended to the No. 1 spot in the polls only to lose and fall back down the pecking order.
Three of those year-long contenders will be in Houston this week competing at the Final Four.
The favorite to capture the national title is ACC champion North Carolina, the nation's preseason No. 1 team and the lone No. 1 seed remaining in the NCAA tournament. The Tar Heels (32-6) ripped through the East region with startling ease, defeating Florida Gulf Coast, Providence, Indiana and Notre Dame by a minimum of 14 points apiece.
North Carolina's skilled, athletic, deep frontcourt gives it an edge in the paint and on the offensive glass over almost every opponent it faces, but the Tar Heels' two potential title game opponents certainly are threats to beat them.
Second-seeded Oklahoma boasts the nation's most lethal scorer Buddy Hield, who has averaged 29 points per game in the NCAA tournament. The 6-foot-4 senior has gone from shooting on milk crates mounted to buildings in his native Bahamas as a kid to hearing 16,000 fans chant his name after he blitzed Oregon for 37 points in Saturday's West Regional finals.
Drawing the unenviable assignment of keeping Hield in check next Saturday is Villanova, a fellow No. 2 seed that has bucked recent history and exceeded expectations in this NCAA tournament. The Wildcats had suffered second-round upsets against UConn and NC State as a top-two seed the past two years, but they bounced back in a big way this March, rolling though their first three games before edging No. 1 overall seed Kansas on Saturday in the Elite Elight.
The one interloper among the highly ranked Final Four entrants is an underdog by seed but not by stature. Tenth-seeded Syracuse became the fourth double-digit seed ever to reach the Final Four when it rallied from a 16-point second-half deficit against Virginia on Sunday.
That Syracuse is in the Final Four is remarkable considering most mock brackets didn't even include the Orange in the field leading up to Selection Sunday. Syracuse has since taken advantage of its controversial NCAA tournament bid, cruising past Dayton and Middle Tennessee in the first two rounds before rallying to edge Gonzaga and Virginia this week.
Of the favorites who didn't make it to Houston, Kansas, Michigan State and Virginia all have the most reason to be disappointed.
The Big 12 champion Jayhawks had the best regular season of any team in the field, but they failed to reach the Final Four as a No. 1 seed for the fourth time since their 2008 national championship. Michigan State and Virginia crashed out of the NCAA tournament in excruciating fashion, the Spartans becoming the eighth No. 2 seed ever to lose in the opening round and the Cavaliers squandering a 13-point lead in the final nine minutes against Syracuse.
The absence of those three national powers paves the way for a pair of rematches in the national semifinals.
Oklahoma throttled Villanova by 23 points on a neutral floor on Dec. 7. North Carolina swept a pair of games against Syracuse in the regular season, winning by 11 at the Carrier Dome in January and by five in Chapel Hill on Feb. 29.
More will be at stake in Houston when that quartet reconvenes. In a year of unprecedented chaos in college basketball, three season-long contenders and one interloper are the sole survivors.
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