Even In Defeat, Saint Peter’s Helps March Madness Top NFL Playoffs

When it comes to the postseason for the ages (well, at least for the first quarter of the 2022 sports year), who wins?

Is it the NFL, exemplified by the Cincinnati Bengals becoming riveting out of nowhere after decades of irrelevance, or is it March Madness, exemplified by the Saint Peter’s Peacocks yanking “impossible” from the dictionary while storming into the Elite Eight?

It’s the Peacocks/March Madness.

St. Peter’s was flattened Sunday 69-49 by North Carolina.

Even so, folks continued to rub their eyes over how this No. 15 seed that ncaa.com said (1) averaged just 546 fans per home game, (2) had never won in the NCAA tournament before this season, (3) spent another year sharing its gym with intramural teams and (4) went 41 days between victories over a Division I opponent — yes, all of those folks wondered how the Peacocks crept this close to the Final Four with victories over No. 2 seed Kentucky, No. 7 seed Murray State and No. 3 seed Purdue.

To translate: This year’s edition of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament rocks more than the NFL playoffs of January and February.

That’s saying a lot.

I mean, have Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs stopped trading clutch throws during an overtime thriller that the hometown Chiefs somehow captured?

The NFL’s other three division playoff games also were all-time keepers.

• You had the visiting Los Angeles Rams surviving Tom Brady’s furious comeback attempt for his Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the final seconds.
• You had a rookie kicker for the Cincinnati Bengals boasting to teammates at the end that he would rip the game-winner in Nashville against the Tennessee Titans before doing just that.
• You had the San Francisco 49ers overcoming the Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field and the lethal arm of Aaron Rodgers for a nail-biting victory in Green Bay.

It’s just that, in contrast to Saint Peter’s owning zero history of success at the highest level of the postseason, the Bengals had two trips to the Super Bowl (1982 and 1989) before Joe Burrow ran out of miracles as their quarterback on February 13 in Inglewood, California.

That’s where the Rams surged past the Bengals in the final seconds for a world championship inside of the Rams’ $5 billion SoFi Stadium. Just like that, the NFL completed a season that began with Forbes determining the average team value rose to $3.5 billion after the pandemic.

According to investopedia.com, the NCAA also thrived during that stretch, mostly due to March Madnesss. The website said “in 2021, college athletics’ governing body earned $1.15 billion in revenue, with the tournament representing almost 90 percent.”

Just wait for the NCAA’s 2022 financial numbers. The men’s basketball tournament never has been more appealing than this season, and the Peacocks have dominated nearly every discussion.

Forty-seven.

That was the sum of the seeds in the Elite Eight (including the Peacocks, of course), and that average seed of 5.9 was the highest for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament since seeding began in 1979.

Not only that, but since the NCAA men’s basketball tournament expanded in 1985, Saint Peter’s became the first team to win multiple games as a double-digit underdog and the first seeded 13 or worse to reach the Elite Eight.

Upsets became a significant thing early in this tournament, and they began with underdogs such as Richmond and New Mexico State shocking Iowa and UConn respectively. For those who filled out brackets for ESPN.com, that website said, “This year, 64.7% of brackets got 19 to 23 games right in the first round. Last year, 73.7% of brackets got 19 to 23 games right in the first round.”

So, this is wonderfully strange: Despite the Peacocks threatening to become the face of 2022 March Madness, the Final Four will feature Duke, North Carolina and Kansas, three of the four winningest programs in college basketball history.

The other Final Four team is Villanova, with nine straight trips to March Madness, including national titles in 2016 and 2018.

Which means this March Madness will get even better.