It makes no sense.

When Kentucky fell to Saint Peter’s in the 1st round of the NCAA Tournament, one of the favorites to win the national championship went down, causing million of brackets to go up in smoke. Some took it as an opportunity to call Kentucky “frauds” because hey, how could the Wildcats have successfully deceived the college basketball world when losing to a school with a single NCAA Tournament win was who it really was?

When Tennessee fell to Michigan in the 2nd round of the NCAA Tournament, one of the hottest teams in the country went down, causing plenty of anti-SEC fans to dance on the conference’s grave. Some took it as an opportunity to call the SEC “frauds” because hey, what else is there to say when you have 4 favorites lose to double-digit seeds on the opening weekend?

Well, there’s actually a lot to say. That school of thought for assessing teams or conferences as a whole makes no sense.

Somehow, there’s little nuance to this yearly discussion. It’s natural to try to understand why a team like Kentucky or Tennessee lost. Shoot, Baylor was the 1-seed who somehow fell behind 25 points in a game the opening weekend. Of course those losses defined their seasons.

So were all of them frauds? Um, no.

The laziest take one could have was determining that by virtue of losing to Michigan, Tennessee was actually undeserving of the 2-seed. As if, in some wild scenario, the selection committee should be about predicting instead of evaluating what the last 4 months told us. Even though there were offensive question marks and the lingering doubt about Rick Barnes in March, the regular season still told us that there weren’t 10 teams better in the country than Tennessee. According to some, it just took Michigan to expose Tennessee for being wildly overrated.

Nope. That doesn’t make any sense.

Guess what? This NCAA Tournament doesn’t really make much sense. Leading up to it, you had people who spent the last 5 months watching basketball publicly predicting that Kentucky would win a national title. That’s what happens when you destroy an eventual 1-seed (Kansas) on its home floor and you seemingly have no bad losses.

Now there’s a difference between understanding why a team lost compared to calling them fraudulent or overrated. Kentucky’s defense, which had been a staple for most of the season, was a shell of its former self in the last few weeks. John Calipari admitted he “may have been trying to coach a team that I coached a month ago, and we had some guys that weren’t playing like they were a month ago” (via The Athletic). That’s fair. Kentucky didn’t show up, and it played its worst game of the season at the worst possible time.

But overrated? That’s silly.

Shoot, it’s even silly to say the SEC itself was overrated. To treat March as some confirmation bias is bonkers. So then Saint Peter’s, by virtue of beating Kentucky, was underrated after losing 11 total games and beating 0 teams from 1 of the 6 big conferences? Of course not.

Some people want to treat the NCAA Tournament like they’re the neighborhood watch. Like, they find out Greg who lives in the house on the corner is a registered sex offender with a checkered past. They then replay all the things in their mind that should’ve tipped them off.

“How could I not have realized that Kentucky’s poor guard play would lead to one of the 2-3 biggest first-round upsets in NCAA Tournament history?!?”

Don’t beat yourself up. Kentucky wasn’t hiding in plain sight as a sex offender. Er, fraud. It had a bad night. In a single elimination tournament, it’s OK to back off sweeping generalizations about a bad night. Mike Krzyzewski and Tom Izzo have both lost to 15-seeds before. Did it mean they were both miraculously overrated and we should question their entire legacy? No. It meant they had incredibly embarrassing losses.

Nobody is above that. Sometimes, the NCAA Tournament confirms what we saw in the regular season. Sometimes it doesn’t. Michigan didn’t confirm what we saw in the regular season. Shoot, the Wolverines hadn’t won consecutive games since Feb. 10 before cooling off Tennessee.

Having said that, is it fair to question the March woes of someone like Barnes? Absolutely. He’s got 25 NCAA Tournament appearances and yet, he has 1 Sweet 16 berth in the last 13 years. That’s a tough pill to swallow.

Most of this tournament has been a tough pill to swallow for the SEC. Let’s call it what it is. The conference isn’t changing any pre-conceived notions about its basketball prowess this March. The SEC choked away that opportunity this year.

But overrated? I guess we should’ve just ignored that the SEC had regular season wins against all 4 of the No. 1 seeds in the field. We should’ve assumed that meant nothing? Then what did matter? The conference tournaments? Like, the ones that Iowa and Tennessee won before failing to make it out of the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament?

This comes down to us trying to make sense of something that often doesn’t make a ton of sense. We feel jaded because of brackets or bets. We want to feel like we have things figured out.

Or rather, we want our narratives to gain support:

(By the way, non-Twitter Danny is actually great. On Twitter, he picks his spots and plays the hits.)

You see, you could tell me that Notre Dame would win a national title by winning every game 105-4, and I’d still tell you that regular season résumé wasn’t as good as Texas A&M’s.

Yet still, even people who do literally nothing but break down the regular season don’t seem to understand this concept:

Lunardi smiled at Tennessee losing to Michigan because he felt validated for claiming the Vols were a 3-seed when even Duke fans couldn’t deny who was more worthy of that 2-seed. Messed up, right? I mean, come on:

Go ahead, Lunardi. Smile for some weird reason.

This is all about confirmation bias. You can really craft any narrative you want for the NCAA Tournament. You want to sell the notion that the Big Ten is the best conference? Point to it having 9 teams in the field in consecutive years. You want to sell the notion that the Big Ten is the most overrated conference? Point to it not winning a national title since 2000.

(In reality, the Big Ten is somewhere in the middle of that. For all the jabs about the national championship, it had 8 teams play for the title in the 21st century. It’s just that the last 7 of them lost … but that is absolutely a trend.)

If you banged the drum all year that the SEC was overrated, you felt validated by results. Even though AP voters had 4 SEC teams in the top 15 heading the NCAA Tournament and KenPom essentially lined up with that as well, sure, guy. You were right and everyone else was wrong.

It’s the same logic that some use on an annual basis with Gonzaga. Had Memphis held onto a double-digit lead and the Zags got ousted on Saturday night in Round 2, you bet the anti-Gonzaga crowd would’ve been out in full force. The tweets about being propped up by the West Coast Conference would’ve been everywhere. Never mind the fact that Gonzaga is projected to have a top-5 pick in the NBA Draft for the second consecutive year and that it’s the only program in the country who reached the Elite 8 in 4 of the last 6 years. Frauds, I tell you!

This argument is tired. It’s lazy. It’s reactionary. It provides zero context.

Let’s treat the NCAA Tournament for what it is and not what it isn’t. It’s not a place where 5 months of data are guaranteed to be validated. It’s instead a place where madness happens. Still, 15 of the last 21 title winners were 1-seeds. There’s a strong chance that the team who wins it all was excellent for the vast majority of the season.

I’ll have my “properly rated” tweet ready to go.