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What Happened: The First Four served up two nail-biters last night, with Howard and Texas both winning single-possession games. Tonight, the tournament's most interesting team takes the court, as the Miami (Ohio) RedHawks try to prove their immaculate regular season was no fluke, but their early exit from the MAC conference tournament was.

Why You Care: Tonight's first game pits the Prairie View A&M Panthers against the Lehigh Mountain Hawks. Both teams come in hot — Prairie View has won seven straight entering play tonight, while Lehigh rides a six-game winning streak. Prairie View needed to catch fire, as they were the eighth seed in the SWAC tournament and no one's pick to make the tournament, but here we are.

Of course, Lehigh needed to win the Patriot League conference tournament to be here, although doing so as the no. 2 seed wasn't so unexpected. I'd take Lehigh in this one — the Mountain Hawks were the better regular season team, they'll have the best player on the court in G Nasir Whitlock (21 PPG), and feature 6-foot-9, 250-pound F Hank Alvey, who can dominate the paint.

The second game of the night will be the most closely watched. Miami (Ohio) ran the table in the regular season, a perfect 31-0 before getting bounced by UMass in the MAC conference tourney. There was much debate as a result of that loss — was an undefeated regular season from a team that advanced metrics tell us is nothing special worth an at-large bid?

Turns out yes, with the caveat of having to go through the play-in game. Miami will need to get through SMU to reach the field of 64, which won't be an easy task. KenPom pegs Miami as the 93rd best team in the nation, a far cry from SMU's 42nd ranking. The Mustangs aren't exactly red-hot entering this one, having lost five of their last six games, knocking off Syracuse in the opening round of the ACC tournament before falling to Louisville.

I don't want to root against the little guy, and I would love to see Miami continue its impressive season. But even a mediocre, inconsistent ACC team such as SMU should be able to prevail over a team that had zero impressive opponents on its schedule and couldn't even win its own conference tournament. I'd love to be wrong here, but I'm not expecting Miami to advance to the tournament's true first round.