The 2011 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament was a single-elimination tournament involving 68 teams to determine the national champion of the 2010–11 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. The 73rd edition of the NCAA Tournament began on March 15, 2011, and concluded with the Connecticut Huskies defeating the Butler Bulldogs, 53–41, in the championship game on April 4 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas. This tournament marked the introduction of the "First Four" round and an expansion of the field of participants from 65 teams to 68. The "South" and "Midwest" regional games were replaced by the monikers "Southeast" and "Southwest" for this tournament, due to the geographical location of New Orleans and San Antonio, respectively.
This tournament was notable for its large number of upsets. In the Southwest region, Florida State (a 10 seed), VCU (11) and Richmond (12) made the regional semifinals. This marked the first time in the history of the tournament that a region was represented by three double-digit seeds in the Sweet Sixteen. The tournament featured the first Final Four to not have one of the top two seeds from any of the four regions. VCU tied 11th-seeded LSU in 1986 and George Mason in 2006 as the lowest seeds ever to reach the Final Four. The semifinal game between VCU and Butler, an 8 seed, had the greatest seed number total of any Final Four matchup in history (19, surpassing the previous mark of 14 set in 1980 and matched in 2006). The Final Four as a whole similarly had the greatest seed number total ever (26, surpassing the previous mark of 22 set in 2000). Butler, making its second straight appearance in the final, tied 8th-seeded UCLA in 1980 and Villanova in 1985 as the lowest seeds ever to reach the championship game. The city of Richmond, Virginia came into the national spotlight when its two teams VCU and Richmond made it into the Sweet 16, a feat last achieved by Los Angeles in 2007 with UCLA and USC.
The Big East had a record eleven teams make the tournament. Due to having more than eight teams qualify, it was possible for intra-Big East matchups to occur in the 3rd round. The Big East had two of the eleven teams make the Sweet 16, including eventual national champion UConn. Both teams won intra-conference matchups to advance.
Northern Colorado, winners of the Big Sky Conference, made its first NCAA Division I tournament.
Read more about 2011 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament: Qualified Teams, Tournament Procedure, Brackets, Record By Conference
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“Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For in the division of the nations of the whole earth he set a ruler over every people; but Israel is the Lord’s portion: whom, being his firstborn, he nourisheth with discipline, and giving him the light of his love doth not forsake him. Therefore all their works are as the sun before him, and his eyes are continually upon their ways.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus 17:17-9.
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)