Another 3 Seed Down: Baylor Collapses, Georgia State Advances

I'm having déjà vu.

Just an hour ago, I wrote about a 3-seeded Big 12 team dropping to a 14 seed in this year's NCAA Tournament.

That exact same thing just happened again. This time, it was even more dramatic.

You'll only find this kind of story in the NCAA Tournament. Georgia State, a 14 seed, is coached by Ron Hunter. His son, RJ Hunter, led the team in points scored per game this year, and was second in rebounds and assists per contest.

With under three minutes to go in today's game, Baylor was actually leading by 12 (that's not a typo). Georgia State then went on a 13-0 run to close the contest, behind the most March Madness-y performances imaginable -- RJ Hunter scored 12 of those points in two minutes of play, including a game-winning, only-seen-in-movies three that forced his father to actually fall out of his chair.

I can't even make this stuff up, guys.

It was obviously a big upset, but actually not one as big as the UAB victory we saw earlier in the day.

We have a metric at numberFire appropriately called nERD, which measures how many points we'd expect a team to win by against an average squad on a neutral court. Georgia State's was a respectable -- for an automatic bid -- 5.91 this year, which ranked 50th among tournament teams.

Baylor's was 15.21, slightly better than Iowa State's (by 0.1 points), and the 13th-best mark in the country. In a random game, from a high level, we'd expect Baylor to beat Georgia State by 9.3 points.

And that probably would've happened if not for an epic collapse. According to numberFire Live, our real-time analytics platform, Baylor had 99.66% odds of winning the contest with 2:39 left to go.

That's why they call it March Madness.