Lowest Seed to Win March Madness and Reach the Final Four

Rupp Arena, Lexington, April 1, 1985. Villanova missed one shot in the second half. The Wildcats, a No. 8 seed that had lost ten games and finished well behind Georgetown and St. John's in the Big East, made 22 of 28 field-goal attempts against a Georgetown team that was the defending champion and the top seed in the bracket. They won 66-64. No team seeded lower has won the NCAA Division I men's basketball championship in the four decades since.

That is the answer, and the rest follows the same pattern. The lowest seed to win March Madness is an 8. The lowest seed to play in the title game is also an 8, which has happened five times. The lowest seed to reach the Final Four is an 11, six times over, and none of the six won a game once it got there. Every figure on this page is counted through the 2026 tournament and begins in 1979, the first year the NCAA seeded its whole field. The totals can move each spring, and a bigger bracket arrives in 2027.

• 8Lowest seed to win the title
• 8Lowest seed in the title game
• 11Lowest seed in the Final Four
• 15Lowest seed in a regional final

NCAA Division I men's tournament, 1979 through 2026. Each figure is a seed number, so a bigger number means a longer shot.

How No. 8 Villanova won the 1985 title

Rollie Massimino's team went into the tournament 19-10. It had already lost to Georgetown twice that winter, and the selection committee placed it on the 8 line in the Southeast, a spot that guaranteed a second-round meeting with a No. 1 seed if it survived the opener. The opener was against Dayton, in Dayton, on the Flyers' home floor. The men's tournament still allowed that in 1985. Villanova won by two.

1. 1First roundBeat No. 9 Dayton 51-49 on Dayton's home floor.
2. 2Second roundBeat No. 1 Michigan 59-55, the top seed in the Southeast.
3. 3Regional semifinalBeat No. 5 Maryland 46-43 in Birmingham, Alabama.
4. 4Regional finalBeat No. 2 North Carolina 56-44 to reach the Final Four.
5. 5National semifinalBeat No. 2 Memphis State 52-45 in Lexington, Kentucky.
6. 6ChampionshipBeat No. 1 Georgetown 66-64, shooting 78.6 percent from the field.

Seeds are the 1985 regional seeds. The 64-team bracket was new that year, so this was the first title that required six wins from every team in the field.

Read the scores in that sequence again. Villanova scored 51, 59, 46, 56 and 52 in its first five games and won them all, because none of the five opponents reached 56. This was a team that defended in a shifting matchup zone, took its time on offense and was content to play a game in the forties. Its three seniors, Ed Pinckney, Dwayne McClain and Gary McLain, had been starting together for years and did not hurry for anyone.

The final was the one game of the six that Villanova won by scoring. Georgetown came in 35-2 with Patrick Ewing at center and had beaten St. John's by 18 in the other semifinal. The Hoyas shot better than 54 percent in the championship game and lost, which tells you what the other bench was doing. Villanova went 22-for-28 from the field. In the second half it took ten shots and made nine. Harold Jensen came off the bench and made all five of his. McClain led the scoring with 17, Pinckney was named Most Outstanding Player, and the 78.6 percent figure is still the best any team has shot in a championship game.

It was also an all-Big East weekend. Three of the four teams in Lexington, Georgetown, St. John's and Villanova, came from one conference, which had never happened before. The 8 seed that won it was the third-best of them by any measure anyone had used in February.

The last tournament played without a shot clock

Several conferences had experimented with a clock during the 1984-85 regular season, but the NCAA did not use one in the tournament. The 45-second clock became a national rule the following fall, so the 1985 final was the last championship game in which a team could hold the ball for as long as it liked. The full story of that rule is in our history of college basketball's shot clock.

It is tempting to say the absence of a clock won Villanova the title. That overstates it. Nobody shoots 79 percent because of a rule. What the rule did was shrink the game. With no clock, a patient team could hold the number of possessions down, and fewer possessions means fewer chances for the better team's advantage to show up in the score. A 40-minute game played at Villanova's pace was closer to a coin flip than the same matchup would be at the speed Georgetown wanted. The shooting turned a close game into a win. The tempo is what made it close in the first place, and it is the part of 1985 that cannot be repeated under the current rulebook.

The other champions seeded fourth or lower

Six champions in 47 seeded tournaments have come from the 4 line or below. Villanova is one. Here are all six.

Year	Champion	Seed	Top-three seeds beaten	Championship game
1983	NC State	6	UNLV (3), Virginia (1), Houston (1)	54-52 over Houston
1985	Villanova	8	Michigan (1), North Carolina (2), Memphis State (2), Georgetown (1)	66-64 over Georgetown
1988	Kansas	6	Duke (2), Oklahoma (1)	83-79 over Oklahoma
1997	Arizona	4	Kansas (1), North Carolina (1), Kentucky (1)	84-79 in overtime over Kentucky
2014	Connecticut	7	Villanova (2), Iowa State (3), Florida (1)	60-54 over Kentucky
2023	Connecticut	4	Gonzaga (3)	76-59 over San Diego State

NC State in 1983 and Kansas in 1988

Jim Valvano's NC State team would not have been in the field at all without winning the ACC tournament, which it did by beating Wake Forest, North Carolina and Virginia on consecutive days. It then won its first NCAA game in double overtime against Pepperdine, beat UNLV by one, and beat Virginia and Ralph Sampson by one in the West regional final. The championship game in Albuquerque ended on the most replayed basket in the tournament's history: Dereck Whittenburg's shot from well beyond 25 feet fell short, and Lorenzo Charles caught it and dunked it as time ran out against a Houston team that had Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. The field held 52 teams that year, and the top four seeds in each region had byes. A 6 seed did not. NC State played six games.

Kansas in 1988 finished 27-11, and those eleven losses are still the most any men's champion has carried. Larry Brown's team lost Archie Marshall to a knee injury in December and at one point dropped four games in a row. It was sent to the Midwest as a 6 seed, drew an 11, a 14 and a 7 in its first three games as the bracket collapsed around it, then beat Kansas State, Duke and Oklahoma. The final was played at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, about 40 miles from Lawrence. Danny Manning scored 31 points and took 18 rebounds against an Oklahoma team that had beaten Kansas twice during the Big Eight season.

Arizona in 1997

Arizona finished fifth in the Pac-10. Lute Olson's team then did something no other champion has done: it beat three No. 1 seeds in one tournament. Kansas went first, in the regional semifinal, a Jayhawks team that had lost once all season. North Carolina followed in the national semifinal and Kentucky, the defending champion, in overtime in the final. Miles Simon was the Most Outstanding Player and Mike Bibby was a freshman. If the measure is the quality of the opposition, this is the hardest path any champion has taken, harder than Villanova's, and it came from a 4 seed.

Connecticut, twice

The 2014 Huskies are the only No. 7 seed to win the title. Kevin Ollie was in his second season, the program had been barred from the 2013 postseason for its academic progress scores, and the team had lost to Louisville by 33 points in early March. Shabazz Napier carried it past Villanova, Iowa State and Michigan State, and then past Florida, which was the top overall seed and had won 30 straight games.

The 2023 team was a 4 seed in name. It lost eight games during a hard Big East schedule, which is what put it on the fourth line, but the predictive ratings had it among the best handful of teams in the country all winter, and it won its six tournament games by 24, 15, 23, 28, 13 and 17 points. It also never saw a No. 1 or No. 2 seed. The two in its own region lost before they could meet it, and none from any region reached that year's Final Four. A low seed's title run usually has one of two shapes. Either the team beats the bracket's best, as Arizona did, or the bracket empties in front of it. Connecticut in 2023 was good enough that it did not matter which.

Lowest seeds in the championship game: five No. 8 seeds

Villanova is the only 8 seed to win the final. Four others have played in it and lost.

The first predates the 64-team bracket. UCLA, in Larry Brown's first season in Westwood, was a No. 8 seed in a 48-team field in 1980. It beat top-seeded DePaul in the second round, reached the final in Indianapolis and lost 59-54 to Louisville. The NCAA later vacated that appearance over the use of ineligible players, so the records book carries it with an asterisk, but the games were played and an 8 seed was 40 minutes from the title five years before Villanova.

Butler was next, in 2011, and it was the program's second straight final. The Bulldogs beat Old Dominion on a tip-in at the horn, beat top-seeded Pittsburgh by a point, and reached Houston, where they shot 18.8 percent against Connecticut and lost 53-41. Twelve made field goals in a championship game. It remains the worst shooting night a finalist has had. Butler's coach, Brad Stevens, was 34 years old and had now taken a Horizon League team to the last Monday of the season twice.

Kentucky's 2014 team was an 8 seed that started five freshmen, had been ranked first in the country in the preseason and then lost ten games before the bracket came out. It knocked out unbeaten Wichita State, then Louisville, Michigan and Wisconsin, the last three on late three-pointers by Aaron Harrison, before losing to Connecticut. That final, a 7 against an 8, has the highest combined seed total of any championship game: 15.

North Carolina in 2022 was Hubert Davis's first team. It beat Baylor, a No. 1 seed, in overtime in the second round, ended Mike Krzyzewski's career in the national semifinal, and led Kansas by 15 points at halftime of the final. Kansas won 72-69. No team had come back from that far down at the half to win a title game.

So the 8 line is 1-4 in finals. Three of the four losers were programs with multiple national titles having an uneven year, which is a clue to what an 8 seed in a final usually is.

Lowest seed to make the Final Four: six No. 11 seeds

Six teams seeded 11th have won a regional. The first did it the year after Villanova.

Year	No. 11 seed	How it got in	Regional final	National semifinal
1986	LSU	At-large, SEC	Beat No. 1 Kentucky 59-57	Lost to Louisville 88-77
2006	George Mason	At-large, Colonial	Beat No. 1 Connecticut 86-84 in overtime	Lost to Florida 73-58
2011	VCU	At-large, First Four	Beat No. 1 Kansas 71-61	Lost to Butler 70-62
2018	Loyola Chicago	Missouri Valley champion	Beat No. 9 Kansas State 78-62	Lost to Michigan 69-57
2021	UCLA	At-large, First Four	Beat No. 1 Michigan 51-49	Lost to Gonzaga 93-90 in overtime
2024	NC State	ACC tournament champion	Beat No. 4 Duke 76-64	Lost to Purdue 63-50

LSU's run came with an asterisk of a different kind. Dale Brown's team played its first two games in Baton Rouge, on its own floor, and needed two overtimes to beat Purdue there. It then beat the 3, 2 and 1 seeds in its region in order, the first team ever to do that, with the win over Kentucky coming after three losses to the Wildcats earlier in the season.

George Mason is the one people mean when they say the word Cinderella. A commuter school in Fairfax, Virginia, it lost in the semifinals of its conference tournament, got one of the last at-large places amid loud objections on the selection show, and beat Michigan State, North Carolina and Connecticut, three programs that had each won a national title in the previous six years. The regional final was played in Washington, D.C., about 20 miles from campus.

Loyola Chicago won three games by a combined four points, each on a shot in the final seconds, with a 98-year-old team chaplain named Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt on the baseline. NC State in 2024 had to win five games in five days at the ACC tournament just to qualify, a route explained on our page about conference tournaments and automatic bids, and then won four more.

No. 9 seeds3teams

No. 10 seeds1teams

No. 11 seeds6teams

No. 12 to 16 seeds0teams

NCAA men's tournament, 1979 through 2026. No team seeded 12th or lower has reached a Final Four. All ten of these teams lost the national semifinal.

Show the numbers

Final Four appearances by teams seeded 9th or lower

Item	Value
No. 9 seeds	3teams
No. 10 seeds	1teams
No. 11 seeds	6teams
No. 12 to 16 seeds	0teams

Why none of them won a national semifinal

Add the three 9 seeds, Penn in 1979, Wichita State in 2013 and Florida Atlantic in 2023, and the lone 10, Syracuse in 2016, and the record of teams seeded ninth or lower in national semifinals is 0-10.

Some of those losses were close. Florida Atlantic lost to San Diego State on a jump shot at the buzzer. UCLA lost to an unbeaten Gonzaga on Jalen Suggs's banked shot from near half court at the end of overtime. Wichita State led Louisville by 12 in the second half. Nothing structural says an 11 cannot win on the first Saturday of April.

But look at who was waiting. The six 11 seeds met a 2, a 3, an 8, a 3 and two 1s. By the national semifinal a low seed has already spent its surprise. The opponent has had most of a week to prepare, the games in recent decades have moved from a basketball arena to a football stadium, and the team across the floor is one that also just won four in a row. VCU had the kindest draw of the six, an 8 seed, and that 8 seed was Butler, which had played in the previous year's final.

From the First Four to the Final Four

Two of the six 11 seeds had to win an extra game to get into the main bracket at all.

The First Four began in 2011, when the field grew from 65 to 68. Four games on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the first round, played in Dayton, Ohio, in every year except the 2021 tournament that was held entirely in Indiana: two between the lowest-ranked conference champions for places on the 16 line, two between the last four at-large teams the committee admitted, usually for an 11 seed. VCU was in the very first set. The Rams had finished fourth in the Colonial, and their selection was criticized on national television within minutes of the bracket being shown. They beat USC in Dayton, then Georgetown and Purdue by 18 points each, Florida State in overtime, and Kansas by ten.

Ten years later UCLA did the same thing. The Bruins had lost four straight going into the tournament and trailed Michigan State by 14 in their First Four game before winning in overtime. Five wins later they were in the Final Four.

Both needed five victories to reach a round that every other semifinalist reached with four. Neither would have been in the field under the old 64-team format.

What that says about the bubble is uncomfortable for anyone who treats the committee's seed list as a precise ranking. The last four at-large teams are, by definition, the ones the committee was least sure about. Twice in the First Four's 15 tournaments, one of them turned out to be among the best four teams over the following three weeks. Others have gone a round or two short of that: La Salle reached the Sweet 16 from Dayton in 2013, Tennessee in 2014, Syracuse in 2018, and Texas in 2026, when the Longhorns won their First Four game by two points, beat BYU and Gonzaga, and lost to Purdue 79-77 in the regional semifinal.

The gap between the 40th-best team in the country and the 20th is small. The gap between both of them and the 250th is enormous. The First Four puts the first kind of team and the second kind in the same building on the same nights, and only one kind has ever gone anywhere.

The 2027 tournament replaces the First Four with a 12-game Opening Round in a 76-team field, with six of those games between at-large teams. How the bigger bracket is assembled is covered in our explainer on how the March Madness bracket is built. More at-large teams starting a round early means more chances for this particular record to be matched. It does not make a five-win run to the Final Four any easier.

How far each double-digit seed has gone, line by line

Below the 11 line the ceiling drops quickly, with one exception that still looks like a misprint.

Seed	Deepest round reached	Team or teams
9	Final Four	Penn 1979, Wichita State 2013, Florida Atlantic 2023
10	Final Four	Syracuse 2016
11	Final Four	Six teams, from LSU 1986 to NC State 2024
12	Elite Eight	Missouri 2002, Oregon State 2021
13	Sweet 16	Six teams, most recently La Salle 2013
14	Sweet 16	Cleveland State 1986, Chattanooga 1997
15	Elite Eight	Saint Peter's 2022
16	Second round	UMBC 2018, Fairleigh Dickinson 2023

The 10 seeds. Syracuse in 2016 is the only one to win a regional, and plenty of people thought it should not have been selected. It drew a 15 seed in the second round after Middle Tennessee upset Michigan State, then beat Gonzaga by three and came from a double-digit deficit in the second half against top-seeded Virginia.

The 12 seeds. They win first-round games more often than any line below them, and exactly two have won three in a row. Missouri in 2002 was a preseason top-ten team that had underperformed; it lost the West regional final to Oklahoma. Oregon State in 2021 had been picked to finish last in the Pac-12, won that league's tournament to steal a bid, and lost to Houston by six with a Final Four place at stake.

The 13 and 14 seeds. Six 13s have won twice, starting with Richmond in 1988 and running through Valparaiso, Oklahoma, Bradley, Ohio and La Salle. Two 14s have, and neither since the 1990s. None of the eight won a third game.

The 15 seeds. This is the oddity. Saint Peter's, a small Jesuit university in Jersey City with an enrollment in the low thousands, beat Kentucky in overtime in 2022, then Murray State, then Purdue, before losing to North Carolina by 20 in the East regional final. That makes the 15 line's best run a full round longer than the 13 or 14 line's. Three other 15 seeds have reached the Sweet 16: Florida Gulf Coast in 2013, Oral Roberts in 2021 and Princeton in 2023.

There is no bracket reason for a 15 to go further than a 13. The explanation is sample size. A handful of teams have been in a position to try, and one of them had a week in which it could not miss a late free throw.

The 16 seeds. Two wins in 164 first-round games, and two losses right after. UMBC lost to Kansas State 50-43 two days after beating Virginia by 20. Fairleigh Dickinson lost to Florida Atlantic 78-70. The first-round records for every pairing, including how often each of these upsets happens, are on our page about March Madness upsets by seed.

How many No. 1 seeds have won the NCAA championship

The other end of the bracket is where most titles are decided. Since full seeding began in 1979, No. 1 seeds have won 29 of 47 championships. Narrow the window to the 64-team era that opened in 1985 and the figure is 27 of 41, almost exactly two in three.

No. 1 seeds29titles

No. 2 seeds7titles

No. 3 seeds5titles

No. 4 seeds2titles

No. 6 seeds2titles

No. 7 seeds1titles

No. 8 seeds1titles

47 tournaments; the 2020 event was canceled. Louisville's 2013 title as a No. 1 seed was later vacated by the NCAA and is counted here as played. No 5 seed has won the title.

Show the numbers

Men's national championships by seed, 1979 to 2026

Item	Value
No. 1 seeds	29titles
No. 2 seeds	7titles
No. 3 seeds	5titles
No. 4 seeds	2titles
No. 6 seeds	2titles
No. 7 seeds	1titles
No. 8 seeds	1titles

A gap sits in that chart. No 5 seed has won the tournament, though several have reached the final, Butler in 2010 and San Diego State in 2023 among them. It means nothing. The 4, 6, 7 and 8 lines have six titles between them over 47 years, and a line with zero is what small numbers look like.

A No. 1 seed winning is the normal result. All four of them reaching the Final Four is not. It has happened twice. In 2008 Kansas, Memphis, North Carolina and UCLA all won their regions, and Kansas beat Memphis in overtime in San Antonio. In 2025 it was Florida, Houston, Duke and Auburn, with Florida winning the final by two. In between came 15 tournaments in which at least one top seed fell short.

Being the best of the four is no guarantee either. The committee has publicly ranked its No. 1 seeds since 2004, and through 2026 the top overall seed has won the title four times: Florida in 2007, Kentucky in 2012, Louisville in 2013 and Connecticut in 2024. Duke held that position in 2026 and did not reach the Final Four.

Four times the opposite has happened and no No. 1 seed reached the last weekend: 1980, 2006, 2011 and 2023. Those are also the years of UCLA's run as an 8, George Mason's as an 11, VCU's as an 11 alongside Butler's as an 8, and a 2023 Final Four of a 4, two 5s and a 9. Low seeds go deep when the top of the bracket breaks, and the top of the bracket breaks about once a decade. Where each of those Final Fours was played, and who won them, is set out in our guide to Final Four history.

What Cinderella means, and which of these teams qualify

A seed is a statement about one season. It says where the committee ranked a team on a Sunday in March. It says nothing about the size of the athletic budget, the conference's television contract or the number of banners already hanging in the gym. The word Cinderella is about those things, and sloppy use of it flattens two very different stories into one.

UCLA in 2021 was an 11 seed. It is also the program with 11 national championships, more than any other, playing out of a power conference with a roster recruited from all over the country. Its run was surprising and it was not a fairy tale. George Mason in 2006 was an 11 seed from a league that rarely earned a second bid, with a head coach, Jim Larrañaga, whose roster was built from players the bigger programs in the region had not recruited. Same line on the bracket. Entirely different event.

Sort the low-seed runs on this page by resources and they split cleanly. LSU, UCLA, NC State, Kentucky, North Carolina, Syracuse and Kansas were major programs having a mediocre regular season by their own standards. Villanova belongs with them: it came from the best conference in the country in 1985. George Mason, VCU, Loyola Chicago, Wichita State, Florida Atlantic and Saint Peter's were something else, teams from leagues that typically get one or two bids and whose best players are often gone to bigger schools within a year now that transfers are immediately eligible.

Then there is the case seed numbers undersell. Butler reached consecutive championship games in 2010 and 2011 out of the Horizon League. The first of those teams was a 5 seed and so appears on no lowest-seed list at all. It lost the 2010 final to Duke 61-59 in Indianapolis, a few miles from its own campus, when Gordon Hayward's shot from half court hit the backboard and the rim and bounced away. A school with an enrollment under 5,000 came within inches of a title and then went back the next year. Measured against what the program had to work with, that is the most improbable two-year stretch of the modern tournament, more so than any single 11 seed's run. What separates the sport's inherited powers from everyone else is the subject of our page on college basketball's blue bloods.

Why low seeds stall before the title

Start with the arithmetic. A champion wins six games in a row. Suppose a team is good enough to have a 35 percent chance in each of them, which is generous for a double-digit seed facing a 6, a 3, a 2 and a 1 in succession. The chance of winning six straight at that rate is under two-tenths of one percent. Raise it to an even 50 percent per game and the figure is still below 2 percent. Runs of two or three wins are what a hot fortnight looks like. Six is a different order of thing.

The opposition also gets steadily better, and it does so by a filter. A low seed that reaches the regional final is not playing a team with a 2 next to its name on paper. It is playing a 2 seed that has just won three tournament games.

The depth gap and the short turnaround

Each weekend of the tournament is two games with one day between them. Thursday and Saturday, or Friday and Sunday. A team that plays seven men and asks its best two for 38 minutes apiece can win the first game on adrenaline. The second, 48 hours later against a roster that goes nine deep, is where legs go and three-pointers start hitting the front of the rim. Saint Peter's beat Purdue on a Friday and lost to North Carolina by 20 on the Sunday. Fairleigh Dickinson and UMBC both lost the second game of their weekend.

Foul trouble matters more to a thin team for the same reason. So does one sprained ankle.

Beating several top-three seeds in a row

No champion seeded below third has avoided the bracket's best entirely except the 2023 Huskies, and they were a top team wearing a low number. Villanova beat two 1s and two 2s. Arizona beat three 1s. NC State beat two 1s and a 3. Even the teams that fell short had usually done the hard part more than once already: LSU beat a 3, a 2 and a 1; George Mason beat a 6, a 3 and a 1.

At some point the supply of upsets runs out. A team that needed a career night from its point guard to beat a 3 seed needs another to beat a 1, and a third in a football stadium a week later. Villanova got one in the last game it played. That is why the record has stood since 1985.

Why lowest-seed records can only start in 1979

Ask for the lowest seed to win the tournament in 1965 and there is no answer, because nobody had a seed.

For its first four decades the NCAA tournament was assembled by geography. Conference champions were assigned to the regional nearest them, East or Mideast or Midwest or West, along with a few independents chosen by regional committees. Nothing ranked the teams inside a region against each other. Two of the best teams in the country could be sent to the same regional because they were both from the same part of the map, and often were.

The field grew to 32 in 1975, the year a conference was first allowed to send a second team. In 1978 the committee tried a halfway measure, seeding the automatic qualifiers and the at-large teams in each region on two separate lists. Full seeding came in 1979, with 40 teams ranked 1 through 10 in each of four regions. That was also the tournament of Magic Johnson's Michigan State against Larry Bird's Indiana State, which is the usual place to date the event's arrival as a national television property.

From there the bracket kept stretching: 48 teams and 12 seed lines in 1980, 52 and then 53 in the early 1980s, and 64 with the full 1-to-16 ladder in 1985. The field went to 65 in 2001 and 68 in 2011.

This matters for reading the records. A 9 seed in 1979, Penn, was the second-lowest team in its region and still reached the Final Four. An 8 seed in 1980 sat in the top two-thirds of a 12-line region. Comparisons across those formats are loose, and the cleanest version of every record on this page is the one that starts in 1985. Restrict it that way and nothing important changes. Villanova's title came in the first 64-team tournament. It was the first champion to need six wins as a matter of course, and it remains the lowest seed to get them.

The women's tournament by comparison

Nothing like Villanova has happened in the women's bracket. Through the 2026 tournament, every NCAA women's champion has been a No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 seed, and the 3 seeds number exactly three: North Carolina in 1994, Tennessee in 1997 and LSU in 2023. The lowest seed to play in a women's final is a 5, Louisville in 2013, which upset top-seeded Baylor on the way and lost the championship game to Connecticut.

The lowest seed to reach a women's Final Four is a 9. Arkansas did it in 1998, a team that had gone 7-7 in the SEC. Its path opened when 16th-seeded Harvard knocked out Stanford, the No. 1 seed in that region, and the Razorbacks beat Harvard in the second round and then Kansas and Duke. They lost the national semifinal to an unbeaten Tennessee team. No women's team seeded tenth or lower has won a regional final, though 10 seeds and an 11 seed have played in one.

Two things hold the women's low seeds back. The talent in the women's game has been concentrated in fewer programs for most of the tournament's history, though the spread is widening. And the format tilts the floor. The top 16 seeds host the first two rounds on their own campuses, so a 12 seed that wants to reach the second weekend has to win twice in someone else's building, the second time against a top-four seed with its own crowd behind it. In the men's bracket those games are in a neutral city. How that hosting system works, and what else separates the two events, is laid out in our guide to the women's NCAA tournament.

One ceiling is shared. In both tournaments a 16 seed has won a first-round game and has never won a second. Harvard's victory at Stanford came 20 years before UMBC's over Virginia, and it is still the only one of its kind in the women's bracket. The rest of the site's college and professional explainers are collected in our basketball section.