TODAY’S SPORTSTAT: Will Loyola, Syracuse join George Mason as only No. 11 seeds to make Final Four?
By JERRY TAPP
How does your bracket look?
The NCAA men’s tourney is set with the “Sweet 16.”
Included in the 16 teams remaining in the tourney are four teams who were seeded from 8 to 16. The four: ninth-seeds Kansas State and Florida State, and 11th-seeds Loyola-Illinois and Syracuse.
Will anyone of these four make it to the Final Four? Based on past history, there have been 11 teams seeded from 8 to 16 that have made it to the Final Four since 1979 when the tournament went to the current seeded system.
Here’s a look at the teams seeded 8 through 16 that have made it to the Final Four since 1979.
1979: ninth seed Pennsylvania
1980: eighth seed UCLA
1985: eighth seed Villanova
2000: eighth seed North Carolina and eighth seed Wisconsin
2006: 11th seed George Mason
2011: eighth seed Butler and 11th seed VCU
2013: ninth seed Wichita State
2014: eighth seed Kentucky
2016: 10th seed Syracuse
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Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.