Whether it's the No. 10 Arkansas Razorbacks advancing in the 2025 men's NCAA tournament or the No. 2 UConn Huskies dominating to the next round of the women's NCAA tournament, both Sweet 16 fields are set and ready to tip off Thursday and Friday.
And while some teams have cruised through with ease, others have stumbled their way through -- or just barely lived up to expectations. So with the help of the numbers, let's examine which teams and players have outdone their usual performances the most so far -- and which ones have come in colder than advertised.
To build our Heat Index rankings for both men's and women's brackets, we're comparing each team's actual point differential in its first two NCAA tournament games to the margin we'd predict based on Sports Reference's Simple Rating System (SRS), which represents each team's opponent-adjusted points per game (PPG) margin from the season as a whole. Hot teams are the ones with better average margins in Rounds 1-2 of the NCAA tournaments than expected; cold teams are the ones that advanced despite playing worse than we'd expect.
Then, for the standout players on those hot (or cold) teams, we calculated the difference between their average Game Score -- a metric that condenses a player's overall box score production into a single number -- in the tourney versus during the regular season to see who's stepping up, or shrinking, under the bright lights of March.
Take the No. 1 seed Duke men, for instance. The Blue Devils already had the nation's highest SRS mark going into the tourney, so their comfortable wins against Mount St. Mary's and Baylor weren't all that surprising -- but their +33.5 average point margin was still 8.5 points better than expected. That was fueled by breakout performances from Tyrese Proctor (20.8 tourney Game Score, up from 9.0 during the season) and Patrick Ngongba II (11.8 vs. 4.7), with Cooper Flagg undershooting his normal average from the season (15.6 vs. 17.0).
Or look at No. 3 seed Notre Dame on the women's side, which has exceeded its expected scoring margin by more than 13 points per game, thanks in large part to a surging Liza Karlen (11.1 tournament Game Score, up from 4.8) and Sonia Citron (18.9 vs. 12.7). Or No. 3 seed Oklahoma, which breezed past Florida Gulf Coast and Iowa by 28.5 PPG, 13.3 more than expected.
But as well as Duke, Notre Dame and Oklahoma are playing -- and as less-dominant-than-expected as their counterparts such as the No. 2 seed Alabama men and No. 1 seed UCLA women have been -- they don't quite top our Heat Index.
Here are the teams -- and their players -- who have exceeded or fallen short of expectations the most through the first two rounds of the men's and women's tournaments: