March Madness: 1 fun fact about each First Four team in the 2026 NCAA Tournament

The “mini-madness” of the First Four kicks off in Dayton Tuesday night with a matchup of 16-seeds Howard and UMBC followed by 11-seeds NC State and Texas getting it on. One night later we’ll watch Prairie View A&M face Lehigh before Miami University looks to keep its dream season alive by taking down SMU.

Here’s one fun fact you should know about all eight of the teams that will be getting the 2026 men’s NCAA Tournament underway.

Howard

Kenny Blakeney won a national championship at Duke in 1992, and immediately jumped into the coaching world following his graduation in 1995. He spent nearly 25 years as an assistant at James Madison, Delaware, Seton Hall, Marshall, Harvard and Columbia, before someone finally gave him a head coaching opportunity in 2019.

That school was Howard, and Bison AD Kery Davis is looking awfully smart for doing so.

Blakeney has now led Howard to the NCAA Tournament in three of the last four seasons. Not bad for a program that only been to the Big Dance twice before (1981 and 1992). The Bison, who last to Wagner in the First Four two years ago, will be playing for their first March Madness victory when they take on UMBC Tuesday night.

UMBC

The Retrievers are back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2018, when they became the first 16-seed ever to upset a 1-seed in the first round game. UMBC’s head coach in that game, Ryan Odom, is now in his first season as the head coach at Virginia, the team the Retrievers shocked in that game.

Since that fact is fairly common knowledge, let’s serve up another one: UMBC is entering the NCAA Tournament on a 12-game winning streak. That’s the second-longest active winning streak in the country, trailing only High Point’s streak of 14 straight wins.

NC State

The Wolfpack are the only team in the field that has four players who average at least four three-point attempts per game and are shooting the three at a 40.0 percent or better clip. Leading the way for Will Wade’s outside attack is Paul McNeil Jr., who is just the fourth player in program history to make 100 or more triples in a season, and is now just four threes away from setting the program’s single-season record.

NC State is 14-3 this season if it shoots 37.5 percent or better from three, but just 6-10 when it shoots under 37.5 percent from beyond the arc.

Texas

The Longhorns are the only team in the tournament with a top 10 offense, but a defensive efficiency ranking that falls outside the sport’s top 100. Texas has lost five of its last six games, and has allowed an average of 88.8 points per gave over those five defeats.

Miami University

Did you know the Redhawks finished the regular season undefeated, becoming just the sixth team in college basketball’s expanded tournament era to do so!? Ok, you probably did. So let’s go with something else.

A big part of the reason for Miami’s success this season lies with the fact that they are the ultra-rare modern mid-major who was able to retain most of its top talent from one season to the next. The Redhawks returned the sixth-most minutes (62%) of any team in college basketball for this season, a fact which many of the players attributed to how last season ended.

Miami made it all the way to the MAC championship game last season, leading Akron by as many as 18 points before losing their shot at the NCAA Tournament on a last-second game-winner by the Zips.

“I know we’d just gone through probably the worst thing a team could go through basically, but we still felt the connectivity with us,” said Peter Suder, Miami’s leading scorer this season. “I think I was the first one to talk to [head coach Travis Steele] within a week and I told him within 10 seconds of our meeting that I don’t want to leave, I want to come back. And then I told him to tell all of the players in their meetings.”

Another example of how often who you keep matters more than who you bring in these days.

SMU

We’re going with a not basketball related, but still interesting fact here.

SMU was only founded because of a conflict between the United Methodist Church and another school with a team in this year’s NCAA Tournament: Vanderbilt University.

For the first 40 years of its existence, Vanderbilt was under the direction of the United Methodist Church. The Vanderbilt Board of Trust severed its ties with the church in June of 1914 over a dispute with the bishops centering around who would appoint university trustees. The church then turned to Dallas to make SMU its new flagship institution.

The two teams, both undefeated at the time, actually squared off back in December, with Vanderbilt pulling off an 88-69 win in Nashville.

Lehigh

The Mountain Hawks nearly didn’t win a game in their own conference tournament. Now they have a chance to win a game in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since CJ McCollum and company stunned Duke in 2012.

Here’s how Lehigh outlasted Holy Cross in the Patriot League quarterfinals two weeks ago:

Could the Mountain Hawks have more March magic in store for Wednesday night? The answer lies where 95 percent of answers lie: TruTv.

Prairie View A&M

The Prairie Athletic program is most-known for one thing: The fact that its a football program once had a record 80-game losing streak from 1989-1998.

Though unlikely to be as commonly known, the Panthers men’s basketball team just made some history of their own: Last week they became the first team in SWAC history to win the league’s conference tournament by winning four games in four days.

Prairie View now gets to play in the Big Dance for the third time in program history. A win Wednesday night would be their first ever in the tournament.