Admit it, this weekend was brutal on your bracket.

No top seed bit the dust, but there were enough upsets to take out eight of the top 16 seeded teams, the most during the NCAA Tournament’s first weekend since 2000. Nine of the top 16 lost during the first four days that year, resulting in one of the “weakest” Final Fours in history. No. 1 Michigan State won the title that year, outlasting 5 seed Florida and 8 seeds North Carolina and Wisconsin.

But I don’t think we’re headed for that kind of Final Four — even if my pre-tournament predictions indicate I’m probably out of the running in most tournament pools — mostly because all those No. 1 seeds are still out there in Illinois, North Carolina, Duke and Washington.

This year reminds me of 1999 when three No. 1 seeds made the Final Four and the final featured the two best teams in the country when UConn beat Duke. This year, it wouldn’t surprise anyone to have Illinois playing UNC for the title. (For those wondering, Michigan State and fourth-seeded Ohio State were the other two that year; not sure if that makes Duke and Louisville the other Final Four teams, though.)

Slide show   March 27 See images from the wins by Michigan State and North Carolina on Day 8 of the NCAA Tournament.

Still, no past tournament can predict what happens this year, as cool of a coincidence that would be. Where does that leave us?

Taking a long hard look at those No. 1 seeds, is what.

Maybe it’s because the perennial powerhouses like Connecticut, Kansas, Oklahoma and Syracuse and the trendy picks like Wake Forest, Gonzaga and Boston College are gone. There’s some familiar March teams, though, like Michigan State, Wisconsin, Arizona and Oklahoma State that could pose challenges to those top seeds.

But there’s a lot of unknowns right now.

There’s a load of longtime Sweet 16 absentees (Villanova and N.C. State haven’t been there since the ’80s; Texas Tech, West Virginia, Utah and Louisville haven’t been since at least ’98) and then there's Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a team that has never been there. If experience counts in March, then these teams could be in trouble.

That could go for every remaining team in the Albuquerque Regional, though. Washington hasn’t been in a regional semifinal since ’98, which means they’re not any more experienced than Louisville, Texas Tech or West Virginia. That’s the longest such drought for a region of teams since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

So write down Albuquerque, the region with the fewest upsets in the tournament, as the biggest tossup. Without Wake in the picture, the Final Four team out of the region is probably the winner of the Washington-Louisville game. That means writing off Bobby Knight and Texas Tech and that pesky West Virginia team — who knew a team on the bubble before the Big Dance could cause so much bracket havoc?

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