While Penn and its fans had to be very disappointed with the freakish lack of upsets this year in the one-bid conference tournaments that relegated the Quakers to a 15 seed, there’s a big upside to this for basketball fans. Namely, the NCAA Tournament field is without a doubt the strongest it has ever been from top to bottom since the expansion to 64/65 teams.

Ken Pomeroy agrees, pointing out that with the exception of Hampton, who lost in the play-in game, no team is outside the RPI Top 150. Pomeroy goes on to say what I have been telling anyone who will listen: Oral Roberts has a very legitimate shot of making history by knocking off top-seeded Memphis. It’s the best 1-16 matchup on paper I can ever remember seeing.

ESPN.com’s Pat Forde also has jumped on the bandwagon. His piece shows that Albany has the best RPI ranking (119th) of any 16 seed since the RPI archives began in 1994. Winthrop has the best RPI of any 15 seed at 73rd. Basically, almost every team in the 13 through 16 seeds is seeded one spot below where it would have been in a normal season.

Now will this mean a lot of upsets? Who knows. It should make for some more competitive games than usual. The bad news for Ivy League fans is that this trend probably won’t extend to Penn, who probably has a 2- to 3-percent chance of beating Texas and maybe a 35-percent chance of keeping it under 15 points. We’ll be running a simulation of the game on College Hoops 2K6 on the Xbox this afternoon and sharing the results on here.