5 lessons from the 2016 NCAA Tournament, starting with going Villanova

But in our rush to lionize Jenkins and Villanova and our perpetual need to put great events and great players in historical context, we can lose sight of how every NCAA Tournament -- and its smallish sample size of games -- actually has lessons worth learning and holding fast to for the future.

This year, I think there are five concrete ones worth keeping in mind for next March, whether you’re a coach hoping your team snips nylon on a Monday night in April, or you’re a fan just hoping for one freakin’ year of bracket nirvana.

I don’t think I even need to append “arguably” to this: Villanova had the best shooting performance in the history of the NCAA Tournament on its run to the title. The Wildcats shot 58.2 percent from the field, best in this Tournament and best by any national champion in any Tournament, and posted four of their eight best effective field goal percentages of the season en route to the title. That evisceration of Oklahoma was one of the best shooting nights I’ve ever seen, with a ludicrous 82.7 percent effective field goal percentage that outdid every shooting night by 2015 Wisconsin -- the most efficient offensive team ever in the KenPom era -- by more than 12 percent.

And it wasn’t Villanova’s most efficient offensive night of the Tournament, because the Wildcats scored 1.57 points per possession against Miami, and poured in “just” 1.52 PPPT against Oklahoma. (We can’t even really delve into how insane it is that Villanova’s best and worst shooting nights all year came against Oklahoma, but that was also a thing that happened.)

Villanova’s average margin of victory in this tournament was 20.7 points per game despite winning a game on a buzzer-beater, and its blow-torching of the field lifted the Wildcats from No. 5 to No. 1 in KenPom despite a road to the title that featured five teams in the rankings’ top 25, and three that were top-five schools when they encountered ‘Nova. Just one team has played six NCAA Tournament games and made a better percentage of its threes than Villanova did this year, and that team, 2002 Indiana, took 19 fewer threes.

I’m not sure Villanova was the best team in college basketball this season, because regular-season Villanova was not NCAA Tournament Villanova. But Villanova is the national champion because NCAA Tournament Villanova was a conquering juggernaut the likes of which we had never before seen.

The lesson: Teams can, in fact, stay white-hot for an entire NCAA Tournament, and they might be unbeatable if they do.

You’ll never guess which team was second to Villanova in field goal percentage in the entire damn Tournament. I’ll wait as you run through the Sweet Sixteen if you want.

It was Michigan State.

Yes, the Spartans, victims of what Mike Rutherford (rightly!) dubbed “the biggest upset in NCAA Tournament history,“ actually shot the lights out against Middle Tennessee State, making 30 of 54 shots (55.6 percent) and putting up their seventh-best game in terms of effective field goal percentage (65.7 percent) all season.

The problem, of course, was that the Blue Raiders had the best night anyone did against Tom Izzo’s defense all year, shooting a tick better from the field and much better from three than the Spartans. Even though Middle Tennessee actually posted a lower effective field goal percentage, a few more offensive rebounds and a few turnovers gave it the extra possessions necessary to edge the Spartans in the only game in the Tournament in which both teams cleared 80 points without 70 possessions.

And the problem for future sure things like Michigan State is that there was really nothing to suggest the Blue Raiders would go off like that. They made 10 or more threes in eight games prior to that performance, but hadn’t done so against a team in the top 100 of KenPom -- and had paired that great perimeter performance with better than 50 percent shooting inside the arc just once. Yet they were white-hot for 40 minutes, hot enough that even a red-hot team that could have won the national title couldn’t keep up.

The lesson: No matter how good you are, a great performance can fell you.

I still think Syracuse probably shouldn’t have been in the NCAA Tournament field. I’m totally at a loss for examples of teams that limped in after losing five of their last six games, and I don’t think I would have given wins over still-figuring-it-out Texas A&M and figuring-out-life-without-Amile Jefferson Duke as much credence as the Selection Committee did.

But it turns out that the Orange’s inclusion wasn’t as favorable as their seed.

Syracuse made the Final Four by beating the No. 7, No. 15, No. 11 and No. 1 seeds in the Midwest Region, and got as lucky as any No. 10 seed ever has, at least on the way to the Sweet Sixteen. Dayton wasn’t a great No. 7, not in a world in which Iowa and Wisconsin each got No. 7 seeds, and Middle Tennessee State just wasn’t going to replicate its night against Michigan State.

In Chicago, Syracuse did better to pull its own weight. Gonzaga was a rock-ribbed No. 11 seed, but it also went cold late against Jim Boeheim’s team, thanks in part to turning on a surprisingly asphyxiating press. So did Virginia, which has even more soul-searching to do after this latest March mishap. And yet, when North Carolina whisked the Orange out of the Final Four, it felt like a restoration of order and sanity.

If Michigan State prevents just a couple more Blue Raiders threes, Syracuse probably doesn’t even make the Sweet Sixteen. If Syracuse ends up in any other region as the No. 10 seed, in fact, Syracuse probably doesn’t make the Sweet Sixteen, and might not even win a game. But a fortuitous draw and the good fortune to benefit from carnage helped propel this year’s most unlikely national semifinalist.

The lesson: Luck shapes NCAA Tournaments as much as great teams do, sometimes.

The Villanova gameplan for Hield was brilliant, if simple: guard ferociously from the tip, deny the ball and make sure he doesn’t beat you. And despite a hot start, Hield certainly didn’t do that.

His failure to shoot Oklahoma past a legendarily hot Villanova team isn’t exactly a black mark on Hield’s career: had he gone for 40, the Sooners might still have lost that game. But his inability to stay hot for a fifth game is a reminder that teams that have more than one option can more reliably cope with an off night by one player than teams propelled by a superstar (or even a couple of them) can.

Yes, the fate of deep and talented Michigan State, which was always far more than just Denzel Valentine, runs counter to this theory. Good teams will always get beaten by hot hands on occasion. But if Buddy Hield couldn’t do it this spring, and Stephen Curry couldn’t do it in his time in the loony March Madness moonlight, singular hot hands probably won’t be fitted for rings any time soon.

The lesson: A superstar or two can only be expected to carry a team so far.

I wrote two years ago that it was okay that the best team in the country doesn’t win the NCAA Tournament when Kentucky and UConn were meeting for the title. Since then, we’ve seen the obvious best team in the country (unbeaten Kentucky) lose in the Final Four in 2015, and seen a Villanova team that didn’t even merit a No. 1 seed become the best team in the country over the course of the NCAA Tournament.

And I think March Madness has been better for it.

The thing that lures us to this 67-game spectacle year after year is never the dominance. Invent time travel and go back to the Ides of March to tell a group of casual fans that this year’s NCAA Tournament winner would win every game by an average of more than 20 points, and you would get eyerolls and groans. March is a month for Davids, and even if the occasional Goliath gets to April -- or the occasional David becomes Goliath -- the underdogs will always have our hearts.

It’s also better to have hard-fought games than blowouts, because those games produce the drama that this event thrives on. Northern Iowa was good enough to spar with Texas and Texas A&M for two full games, good enough to win and lose games in equally spectacular fashion. But it was also probably good enough to make the Sweet Sixteen if given fellow No. 11 seed Gonzaga’s draw, and also a better David than No. 11 seeds Vanderbilt and Michigan would have been against the Lone Star State powers.

I refuse to believe the Selection Committee doesn’t consider potential dramatics when seeding its field, and every year produces tantalizing possibilities like the Texas-Texas A&M game that the Panthers scuttled and the Kentucky-Indiana classic that actually transpired to back me up. Surely, that also means that terrific mid-majors will be pitted against titans even if that’s not quite fair to one or both teams.

But if the NCAA Tournament were solely about rewarding merit, it wouldn’t include 68 teams, far more than could even conceivably be the nation’s best, and Charles Barkley wouldn’t be used as a studio analyst to say things derived from a week of watching tape in between shooting commercials.

The lesson: Let go of any idea that March Madness is a meritocratic, egalitarian venture, and let the NCAA Tournament be what it is: a beautiful mess.