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NCAA Tournament Facts & Figures

Handicapper Matt Fargo recently broken down some of the past NCAA Tournaments to see what we could learn from them.  Some of the trends he found were pretty obvious, but other were not.

The brackets will be announced this Sunday and predictions will start to take shape.  This was a similar season to 2006-2007 with changes at the top of the rankings throughout the year.  There were 4 teams that passed the #1 ranking around, but no one seemed to hold onto it.  North Carolina was the pre-season #1 and ended the regular season there (before the conference tournaments).

UNC held the top spot in the nation for the first eight weeks of the season, but things were shaken up after that.  Pitt took the number one rank for the next two weeks of the season, then Wake Forest leap-frogged the Panthers for a week, followed by one week with Duke at number one, then UConn for a three weeks in a row, back to Pitt, back to UConn, and finally back to North Carolina.  This isn’t because there isn’t so much that there isn’t a major power in college basketball this season, it has more to do with all of these teams being so good.  There will be a lot of debate about who will be the four number one seeds in the NCAA tournament and the results of the conference tournaments will have a lot to do with it.

Looking back at tournament history can tell us a lot about the upcoming tournament.  Last year was the first time ever that all four number one seeds made it to the Final Four.  Prior to that the most ever was 3 number one seeds back in 1999.  At least 2 number one seeds have made it to the semis in 18 of the last 30 years, while at least three top seeds have made it just four times.

Last season, in 24 of the first 32 games, the higher seeded team moved onto the next round.  Two nine seeds beat eight seeds, one ten seed beat a seven, and one eleven seed knocked off a six.  There were also a pair of twelve seeds that upset five seeds and two thirteen seeds upset four seeds.  It just goes to show you that there will always be upsets, but that you must choose them wisely as the top seed wins much more often than not.

2007 showed this more than any tournament in recent history with just 5 lower seeds winning in the first round.  Two of the number one seeds made it to the Final Four that year, but it was the first time since 1993 that all four Final Four teams consisted of only #1 and #2 seeds.

2006 was the second consecutive season in which both a 13 and 14 seed won in the first round of the tournament.  Overall there were 9 lower seeds that ended up winning in the first round.  The most surprising part of this particular tournament was that no number one seed made it to the final four, the first time that had happened since 1980.

2005 had eight first round upsets, the biggest being 14th seeded Bucknell winning.  Two number one seeds made it to the Final Four this year, but it was also the first year since 2002 that a team seeded lower than 3rd made it to the Final Four.

2004 had just four lower seeds move to the second round of the tournament.  Of the teams that made the Final Four, just one was seeded lower than #2, which was 3rd-seeded Georgia Tech.

In 2003 there were a total of eight first round upsets with 3 of those upsets being the 9 seed defeating the 8 seed.  The most memorable thing about the 2003 tournament was 3rd seeded Syracuse, who ended up winning the Championship, the first time in eight years that a #1 or #2 did not win the final game.

Since the modern bracket (64 teams) no number one seed has ever lost in the first round and just four number two seeds have fallen since the field expanded in 1985.  Higher seeds in the tournament clearly have an advantage, but the trick is finding those ones that don’t.  Good luck!