2018 NCAA Tournament: You Don’t Need A #1 Seed To Win - But Historically, High Seeds Usually Win

According to oddsmakers, Villanova, a top seed that won the NCAA title two years ago, is the favorite to win the 2018 national championship.

The odds would be on the Wildcats’ side even if they weren’t voted the AP’s best team for eight weeks during the ’18 season. Just being a No. 1 seed helps. Top seeds have won 21 of 39 men’s national championships (53.8 percent) since seeding began in 1979.

Eleven of the last 17 titles (64.7 percent) were won by a No. 1 seed, most recently UNC in 2017.

At the other end of the spectrum, Loyola-Chicago of the Missouri Valley Conference – which spawned the Big 10 the way the Southern Conference birthed the ACC -- is the first double-digit seed from outside a power conference to reach the Final Four since Virginia Commonwealth in 2011. To date, no team seeded lower than eighth was won the NCAAs.

In fact, just five teams seeded lower than third won an NCAA championship in the seeding era (12.8 percent) – No. 4 Arizona in 1997 with walk-on guard Josh Pastner, now head coach at Georgia Tech; No. 6’s Kansas in 1988 coached by UNC grad Larry Brown and led by current Wake coach Danny Manning, and Jim Valvano’s NC State squad in 1983; No. 7 UConn in 2014; and No. 8 Villanova in 1985.

Top seeds comprised a pair of contestants in three of the last four Final Fours. Only in 2008 were all four entrants No. 1 seeds.

Every team in this year’s Final Four has previously won a national title. That last happened in 2015.

As for the ACC, of a dozen title-winners since 1981, 10 were top seeds and another, Duke in 1991, was a No. 2.