Early March Madness predictor: Why history suggests one of these 12 teams will win the men’s national championship

Early congratulations, Tennessee, Auburn, Iowa State and Duke! Start mapping out the parade route, Kentucky, Marquette, Alabama and Gonzaga! Make room for a banner in the rafters, Florida, Kansas, Purdue and Oregon!

History suggests that one of you will be climbing ladders and cutting down nets in San Antonio on the first Monday night in April.

Those are the top dozen teams in this season’s newly released Week 6 AP poll, a poll that has been a surprisingly accurate tool when predicting men’s college basketball’s eventual national champion. The past 20 national champions and 34 of the past 35 were each ranked in the top 12 in their respective season’s Week 6 AP poll.

As former ESPN college basketball writer John Gasaway was the first to note, no other week during the season has been more accurate, not even the polls that come out in late February or March.

The average preseason rank of the past 20 eventual national champions has been 9.5. Since the 2003-04 season, the average Week 6 ranking of the eventual national title winner has been 4.8. And those soon-to-be national champions have an average ranking of 5.6 in the final AP poll before the NCAA tournament begins.

The last time a team outside the top 12 in Week 6 made a national championship run, freshman Carmelo Anthony was leading Jim Boeheim to his lone title at Syracuse. The late-blooming 2002-03 Orange didn’t enter the AP Top 25 until mid-January but caught fire thanks to the heroics of Anthony, Hakim Warrick and Gerry McNamara.

Before that, you have to go all the way back to Danny Manning’s 1987-88 Kansas team to find another national champion that didn’t crack the Week 6 AP top 12. Those 11-loss Jayhawks earned the nickname “Danny and the Miracles” when they went from a No. 6 seed in the NCAA tournament to winning the national title.

Why is Week 6 the predictive sweet spot? Why has this particular poll outperformed all others when identifying the team that will soon be ankle-deep in confetti?

It’s easy to explain why AP voters are typically more reliable in Week 6 than in earlier iterations of the poll. By early December, the premier multi-team tournaments are behind us, as are many of the marquee non-conference matchups. We know more about who’s a contender and who’s a pretender than we did before the season began.

For example, take Auburn, which began this season outside the top 10 but has outperformed expectations. The Tigers have made a strong case for the No. 1 spot with impressive victories over Houston, Iowa State, North Carolina and Memphis and a narrow loss at Duke.

Conversely there’s Arizona and North Carolina, preseason top-10 teams that so far haven’t lived up to the hype. Neither appear to be serious title contenders after suffering a combined eight early losses and failing to notch a single marquee win.

The bigger mystery is why Week 6’s conventional wisdom has proven as reliable or more than AP voters’ late-season evaluations. In theory, more games should provide more data points and a richer understanding of which teams are truly elite.

Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. In 2016, Villanova slipped as low as No. 17 in the AP poll after a pair of double-digit December losses to Oklahoma and Virginia. Not until conference play did the Wildcats find their footing and ascend as high as No. 1 on their way to Jay Wright’s first of two national titles.

More often than not, however, the ranking of national championship-caliber teams doesn’t fluctuate all that much. Of the 39 national champions since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, 22 of them never spent a single week outside the top 10.

UConn and Purdue, the two teams that played for the national title last season, never dropped out of the AP top five after Week 6. Nor did recent national champions Baylor in 2021, Virginia in 2019 or Villanova in 2018. Those teams proved themselves early on and did little to damage their stock thereafter.

The most conspicuous outliers are a trio of UConn title teams whose paths defied conventional wisdom yet mirrored each other. In 2011, 2014 and 2023, the Huskies ascended from off the radar during November and December, struggled to achieve consistency in Big East play and then regained their early-season swagger once the postseason began.

They each were top-10 teams in Week 6. They each tumbled out of the top 20 in January or February. They each finished the season under a blizzard of red and blue confetti.

It would be good news for the SEC if the Week 6 AP poll retains its predictive powers this year. The SEC boasts five of this week’s top 12 teams, more than any other conference in the nation.

Who is the most likely team to draw inspiration from 2003 Syracuse and go from outside the Top 12 in Week 6 to hoisting a championship trophy at the end of the season? It might be two-time reigning national champion UConn, which plummeted from No. 3 to No. 25 last week after three nightmarish days in Maui. The 18th-ranked Huskies have since steadied themselves, defeating Baylor and Texas.

Besides UConn, Houston is another preseason top-five team that stumbled out of the starting blocks but could yet reemerge as a title threat. The 15th-ranked Cougars have squandered late leads against Auburn, Alabama and San Diego State so far this season.

BetMGM still lists both UConn and Houston among the top half dozen favorites to win a national title this spring.

If either of those bets come through, it would mean defying 20-plus years of polling history.