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2023 Men's Final Four: The New Standard of Parity or Once-in-a-Lifetime Seed Medley?

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Florida Atlantic's Dusty MayAl Bello/Getty Images

Whether you prefer to call the 2023 men's Final Four quartet historic, preposterous, unprecedented or something else altogether, one thing is for certain: It is a unique collection of teams and seeds.

While this isn't quite the largest cumulative seed total in Final Four history—4+5+5+9 equals 23, and the 3/4/8/11 Final Four in 2011 summed to 26—this is the first tournament since seeding began in 1979 to feature a Final Four without any No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 seeds.

Florida Atlantic, Miami and San Diego State are all playing in their first Final Four, making this the first three-part first-timers grouping since Jacksonville, New Mexico State and St. Bonaventure all made it for the first (and still only) time in 1970.

Florida Atlantic won its first tournament game this year.

Thanks to San Diego State, the Mountain West Conference finally reached the Elite Eight, and even the Final Four.

If FAU beats SDSU in that acronym extravaganza, it will be the first time in tournament history that a No. 9 seed or worse plays for a national championship.

That's quite the far cry from last year's foursome of Kansas, North Carolina, Duke and Villanova, each of whom had already won multiple national championships.

It all begs the question: Could/should we have seen this coming?

Was this just an exceptionally mad March Madness, or is it a changing of the guard, ushering in a new world order of bracket-picking chaos in which throwing darts is legitimately the most effective strategy?

Miami's Jordan Miller (11), Nijel Pack (24), Isaiah Wong (2) and Norchad Omier (15)Jamie Squire/Getty Images

For the former question, yes, we should have and did see this type of chaos coming. Not this exact grouping, though.

Per NCAA.com, only one in roughly 600,000 brackets correctly predicted this Final Four, and most of those six brackets looked like garbage in the first few rounds. ("Bracket 6" had three No. 16 seeds winning in the first round, but my favorite is "Bracket 3," which had seven double-digit seeds reaching the Sweet 16 before finally deciding to pick some would-be favorites in the second weekend.)

But from a general "parity is at an all-time high" and an "anything could happen in this tournament" perspective, yes, this was foreseeable.

What we thought might happen on the parity front was an outlandish number of first-round upsets and perhaps multiple double-digit seeds into the Elite Eight for a third consecutive year.

With Charleston, Drake, Furman, Iona, Kent State, Oral Roberts and VCU each winning their respective conference tournaments, this year's No. 12 and No. 13 seeds looked about as strong as ever. Couple that with a collection of No. 4 and No. 5 seeds loaded with question marks—Can Saint Mary's, San Diego State, Tennessee or Virginia score enough to win? Can Indiana or Miami stop anything?—and let's just say I had already looked up before the first Thursday of the dance that the most first-round wins by No. 12 and No. 13 seeds was four in each of 2001, 2002, 2008, 2009, 2013 and 2019.

By some miracle, though, Furman over Virginia was our only upset in the Nos. 12-13 range, and there were only five double-digit seeds in the round of 32—tied with 2015 and 2017 for the lowest such mark in the past 15 years.

That paved the way for parity to really sink its teeth into the subsequent two rounds, though, as the gap between No. 1 and No. 5 seeds was effectively nonexistent this year.

Throughout the season, being ranked No. 1 felt like a death knell. North Carolina becoming the first-ever team to miss the tournament after opening the year at No. 1 in the AP poll was the most drastic example, but no team held onto the top spot for more than four consecutive weeks. It went UNC, Houston, Purdue, back to Houston, back to Purdue, Alabama, Houston one more time and then Alabama in the end.

The battle for best in the country felt like a game of hot potato.

Connecticut's Donovan ClinganBrian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Moreover, considering Alabama, Houston and Purdue have combined for zero national championships, there was this constant "OK, but who's actually going to win it all?" feeling when looking at the top of the rankings. We ended the year with a top seven of those three teams, Texas, Marquette, UCLA being held together by Band-Aids and Kansas trying to make history by repeating as national champion, which made an all-No. 1 seeds Final Four feel downright impossible.

I wrote an article in late February on the Achilles' heel of every AP Top 10 team and had no problem coming up with one for nine of the 10. (The exception to the rule was UCLA, which was emerging as the favorite to win it all until injuries began to pile up.) It's usually a challenge to come up with a legitimate complaint about at least a few of those top teams. Not this year. And none of the 10 made it to Houston.

Long story short, there were no great teams this season.

But in the era of that sweet, sweet NIL money and players being allowed to transfer at least once without the sit-a-year penalty, is this our new normal? Everyone's kind of good, but no one's great?

Probably not.

San Diego State's Darrion TrammellGrace Bradley/NCAA Photos via Getty Images

Things may begin to re-normalize beginning in 2025-26 once the free COVID-19 year of eligibility (2020-21) is no longer drastically impacting roster construction.

Case in point: Five of the nine guys in San Diego State's primary rotation were freshmen in 2018. Adam Seiko is already 25 years old, and Nathan Mensah isn't far behind. And the Aztecs were merely the 21st-most experienced team this season, per KenPom.

Being super old didn't help Notre Dame or UAB make the tournament, didn't help Virginia or Iowa State survive the first round and didn't help Penn State or Maryland reach the Sweet 16. But when you have hundreds of players (probably close to 1,000 each year) coming back for a fifth/sixth season, it creates a trickle-down, redistribution-of-wealth sort of national scenario via the transfer portal.

Hat tip to Sleepers' Greg Waddell for looking this one up: 40 percent of the starters and 43 percent of the primary rotation members in the Final Four were transfers. While the transfer portal won't go away once that free year of eligibility is far enough in the rearview mirror to no longer matter, there will be much less of a "no room at the inn" situation annually at power conference programs. That could result in less talent being spread out across the country.

By 2025-26, programs also figure to have a better grasp on this NIL world, resulting in an annual "the rich keep getting richer" environment.

We'll see whether the programs that best grasp it are the traditional blue bloods reasserting their dominance. Maybe a few other teams like Miami will more or less buy their way into becoming college basketball royalty. At least to some extent, though, there will probably be a new normal of the same 6-8 teams ranking among the 10 best in the nation year in and year out.

However, chaos may well reign supreme for at least the next two years. And it's not like March Madness has ever followed any sort of script.

UMBC made history long before COVID-19 was a thing. And when Oral Roberts started the current streak of three consecutive years with a No. 15 seed reaching the Sweet 16, there was no NIL, the free year of eligibility hadn't gone into effect yet, and that team didn't even have a senior (let alone a fifth-year senior) score a single point in the tournament.

Barring some fundamental change to college basketball (switching from 40-minute games to 48-minute games) or its postseason format (abandoning the single-elimination format), the rampant unpredictability of March isn't going anywhere.

But nary a No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 seed playing in the Final Four?

If it doesn't happen in 2024 or 2025, that might never happen again.

Kerry Miller covers men's college basketball and Major League Baseball for Bleacher Report. For however much longer Twitter lasts, you can follow him: @kerrancejames

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