NCAA Tournament: Why UMBC level upset won’t happen in football

The NCAA Tournament got their first ever victory by a No. 16 seed on Friday – a level of upset that football fans will never get to see.

Finally, we will never have to hear the tired old stat that a No. 16 team has never won a game in the NCAA Tournament – the men from the University of Maryland Baltimore County took care of that on Friday when they embarrassed the top overall seed in the tournament, the Virginia Cavaliers, by 20 points to get the biggest upset maybe in sports.

Aside from the Cavaliers totally humiliating the ACC and busting as many brackets as possible, it also knocked down one of the biggest walls in all of sports – with some even going as far as calling it the biggest upset in the history of sports.

When you break it down, that’s incredibly possible…and something you will never see in major college football.

For all intensive purposes, lets us break down this matchup. Virginia was the top ranked team in the country entering March Madness – while the Retrievers (yes, that’s their real mascot) were 16-9 in the American East Conference just over a month and a half ago and lost by 44 points to Albany before winning eight of their last nine games entering the NCAA tournament.

To put that in college football terms, that would be like an Alabama or a Clemson the past few seasons losing to a middle of the road FCS team from an average conference – not a good one like North Dakota State or James Madison of late, but someone like a Sacramento State or a Yale.

Basically, it’s never going to happen. The gap in college football is much wider than that in college basketball. For one thing, basketball teams play power schools all the time because it’s all considered Division 1 – UMBC played games this season against Arizona, SMU and Maryland so they weren’t as shell shocked by the bright lights.

Usually, when there has been a FCS win over a FBS program, it is either a good lower level team beating a bad upper level squad (Kansas when they have lost, for example) – or a case like former FCS power Appalachian State beating Michigan on the road or almost FBS Georgia Southern beating Florida a few years back.

Even with FSU football suffering one of their worst years in the last four decades, a loss to FCS punching bag Delaware State would have been a monumental upset – but the Seminoles won the game by 71 points.

Next: FSU among few playing multiple P5 non conference foes

There will be more times when a No. 16 seed is celebrating being able to live another day in the NCAA tournament. There will never be a time where a football team from the middle of the FCS will be jumping for joy after upsetting the top ranked team in the FBS.