Measuring the Madness

STA 199 Project

Every year, a selection committee assigns seeds to college basketball teams across the country that determine their schedule to reach the National Championship (NCAA). The best teams in the country generally receive the top seeds (1-2) while lower-performing, less well-known teams, generally receive the lowest seeds (15-16). The seed is essentially a prediction of how far a team will progress in the tournament (Singh). The 1 seed is predicted to go to the final four, 4 seeds to make the Sweet Sixteen, and 16 seeds to be eliminated in the first round. However, March Madness is special because of its upsets. For this reason, we are interested in how seeds perform relative to expectations. What seeds tend to overperform while others underperform? Our research question is thus: “How have college basketball seeds performed in March Madness relative to their expected outcomes between 1985 and 2019?”