PORTLAND, Ore. — March Madness blew up brackets across the country when No. 12 High Point stunned No. 5 Wisconsin 83-82 to open a first-round surge that sent four double-digit seeds into the second round, March 19. By day’s end, VCU, Texas and Texas A&M had joined the Panthers, leaving fewer than 0.04% of ESPN’s 26.5 million brackets still perfect.
The shock started with Chase Johnston’s late layup to beat Wisconsin, a finish that delivered High Point its first March Madness win after last year’s opening-round loss to Purdue. “I wasn’t really thinking whether it was a 2 or a 3,” Johnston said afterward, “I was just trying to put it in and win the game.” The broader damage came into focus in AP’s day-one tournament roundup, which showed how quickly the bracket shifted from tidy to unstable.
March Madness brackets were doomed early
High Point was the first crack in the bracket, not the last. VCU erased a 19-point deficit to beat North Carolina 82-78 in overtime, Texas knocked off BYU 79-71, and Texas A&M sent Saint Mary’s home 63-50. Those results did not come from the same formula, but together they restored the annual feeling that no seed line is ever fully safe.
That is what made High Point’s result feel larger than one upset. The Panthers turned a familiar 12-over-5 danger zone into a national reset, and once that slot broke, every popular pick beneath it started to feel a little more fragile. One closing burst from a poised mid-major backcourt was enough to turn a comfortable bracket into a salvage job before the first full day was even over.
Why High Point set the tone
High Point did not look like a team satisfied to simply appear in the field. The Panthers attacked Wisconsin’s guards, made enough perimeter shots to stay close and finished the final minute with more clarity than the favorite. The upset also carried a program-level breakthrough: it was the school’s first NCAA Tournament victory, which instantly shifted High Point from feel-good entrant to legitimate March story.
That storyline also landed at the right time for the tournament itself. Last year’s all-power-conference Sweet 16 prompted questions about whether the sport’s Cinderella lane was shrinking, especially in the transfer portal and NIL era. But March has a long memory, and its identity still depends on the possibility that a smaller school can flatten a giant for 40 minutes.
March Madness history says the chaos never really leaves
There is a direct line from High Point to earlier bracket breakers. Saint Peter’s stunning Kentucky in 2022 remains one of the tournament’s defining underdog shocks of the modern era, and Fairleigh Dickinson’s takedown of No. 1 Purdue in 2023 proved again that seeding only guarantees introductions, not endings. High Point’s win did not reach those extremes, but it revived the same central truth: the opening round is where confidence gets punished fastest.
That does not make every underdog a future regional finalist, and it does not mean favorites suddenly stop being favorites. It does mean March Madness is behaving like March Madness again. High Point supplied the spark, the other lower seeds piled on, and millions of brackets were left trying to recover from a Thursday they never saw coming.
