March Madness grades: UConn earns ‘A+,’ Kentucky gets ‘F’ on report card after games on opening weekend

Grading teams on how they performed through the first two rounds of the 2024 NCAA Tournament

Mar 24, 2024

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11:53 pm ET

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4 min read

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There are just 16 teams left standing in the 2024 NCAA Tournament, so sticking with the theme of the Sweet 16, below I’ve handed out 16 grades — mostly for teams still in the hunt, plus a select few who were clipped early — to get you up to speed on all the good and not so good that’s headlined March Madness through two rounds of action.

The good has been overwhelming, which made my job as teacher in this exercise quite easy. Purdue, Duke, UConn? You get stickers. Congrats on being a teacher’s pet. After two dominant wins in the first two rounds, you earned the only three A+ grades from yours truly.

The bad, though, was … well, it was bad. Sorry, Kentucky, but the highest-seeded team to get bounced in Round 1 is not an accolade worth celebrating. There were some terrible performances in this NCAA Tournament, and some even worse than the Wildcats’ showing, but no one deserved an F more than John Calipari’s team given the lofty expectations and subsequent face plant to a No. 14 seed Oakland team. 

Let’s get to the report card after the opening weekend of the 2024 NCAA Tournament. 

College basketball grades: Opening weekend report card

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