Your Guide To The 2019 NCAA Men’s Tournament: South region

Top seed outlook: Could No. 1 Virginia exorcise the past year’s demons now that the group is at full strength? Our version thinks so. The Cavaliers have a 49 percent likelihood of cracking the Final Four and a 31 percent likelihood of accomplishing what would be the program’s first national title match.
Together with De’Andre Hunter, who wasn’t on the court last year during UVA’s historic loss to No. 16 Maryland Baltimore County, the Cavaliers have been dominant on both ends — the only team standing in the top five in Pomeroy’s adjusted offense and defense metrics. Once again, Tony Bennett’s package line defense is suffocating most every offensive chance and successfully turning games into rock fights. However, this year’s group is better on the offensive end and ought to breeze to the Elite Eight, in which it could meet Tennessee. Due to Grant Williams along with the wonderfully named Admiral Schofield, the No. 2 Volunteers are enjoying their best basketball in program history. We provide them a 22 percent likelihood of reaching the Final Four.
Sneaky Final Four select: No. 6 Villanova. Is it”sneaky” to pick the team that has won just two of the past three national titles? Maybe not. But this has not been the same group that coach Jay Wright advised to those championships. After losing a ton of its best players from last year’s title-winning team, the Wildcats had an up-and-down year and dropped five of the final eight regular-season Big East games. However they also got hot over the past week, capping off a year where they still won the Big East regular-season and conference-tournament titles — and had one of the 20 greatest offenses in the country based on KenPom (powered by an absurd amount of 3-pointers). Our power ratings think they’re the fourth-best team at the South despite being the No. 6 seed, and they have a 5% chance of making it back to the Final Four for a third time in four seasons.
Don’t bet on: No. 4 Kansas State. Coach Bruce Weber’s Wildcats almost made the Final Four last season, however they might find it harder this time around. K-State comes with an elite defense (it ranks fourth in the nation based on Pomeroy’s ratings), but its crime is prone to battles — and may be down its second-leading scorer, forward Dean Wade, who missed the team’s Big 12 tournament loss to Iowa State with a foot injury. A barbarous draw that gives the Wildcats tough No. 13 seed UC Irvine in the first round, then puts them opposite the Wisconsin-Oregon winner at Round two, could restrict their capability to advance deep into a second consecutive tournament.
Cinderella watch: No. 12 Oregon. In accordance with our model, the Ducks have the very best Sweet 16 odds (24 percent) of almost any double-digit seed at the championship, more than double that of any other offender. Oregon struggled to string together wins for most of the regular season, and its own chances appeared sunk following 7-foot-2 phenom Bol Bol was lost for the year with a foot injury in January. But the Ducks have rallied to win eight straight games going into the tournament, such as a convincing victory in Saturday’s Pac-12 championship. Oregon matches a similar mold as K-State — excellent defense with a suspect offense — but that is telling, since the Ducks are a 12-seed and the Wildcats are a No. 4. If they fulfill in the Round of 32, we give Oregon a 47 percent chance at the upset.
Player to watch: Grant Williams, Tennessee
The junior has come a long way from being”a fat boy with some ability.” Williams, the de facto leader of Rick Barnes’s Volunteers, has bullied the SEC within the previous two seasons, collecting two successive conference player of the year honors.
The Vols might just feature the best crime of Barnes’s coaching career — and we are talking about a man who coached Kevin Durant! A lot of that offensive potency could be tracked to Williams, the team’s top scorer and rebounder, that ranks in the 97th percentile in scoring efficacy, based on data courtesy of Synergy Sports.
Williams owns an old-man match you might find at a regional YMCA, a back-to-the-basket, footwork-proficient offensive attack that manifests mostly in post-ups, where he ranks in the 98th percentile in scoring efficiency and shoots a adjusted field-goal proportion of 56.1. He can find the Volunteers buckets from the waning minutes of matches, too, as he positions from the 96th percentile in isolation scoring efficiency.
Likeliest first-round upsets: No. 9 Oklahoma over No. 8 Ole Miss (53 percent); No. 12 Oregon over No. 5 Wisconsin (45 percent); No. 10 Iowa over No. 7 Cincinnati (34 percent)

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