Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

The 2021 NCAA Basketball Tournament and season have come to a close, but a new season always provides new data and new stories to tell about that data. In the 2021 Tournament, one story line was the apparent ease at which No. 2 seed Houston was able to reach the Final Four. The Cougars' path to the final weekend went through a No. 15 seed (Cleveland State), a No. 10 seed (Rutgers), a No. 11 seed (Syracuse), and finally a No. 12 seed (Oregon State).  This marked the first time in history that a team had reached the Final Four without facing a single-digit seed. By some measure, this implies that Houston had the easiest path in history to the Final Four. But, for me, this type of discussion always begs the question of how to quantify something like the difficulty of a given NCAA Tournament path. My approach to try to answer this question is to try to define a benchmark or reference team and to then calculate the odds that this hypothetical team would reach the Final Four given any ar...

The 2020-21 men's basketball season might be over, but now is a good time to reflect on the results of the NCAA Tournament, both this year, and historically. In my previous analysis, I showed how Michigan State University head coach Tom Izzo dominates all other coaches when it comes to NCAA Tournament performance relative to expectation. However, being the best relative to expectation is just another phrase for over-achieving. On some level, it's a moral victory. What it more important is actual victories, and fortunately, Coach Tom Izzo has plenty of those as well. In today's contribution, we will see the Coach Izzo is still one of the best coaches in history in the month of March. Period. Overall Wins and Percentages Let's begin by simply looking at some wins and losses. Table 1 below give the NCAA Tournament win-loss record for the 30 head coaches with the most total games played in the modern era (from 1979 on).  Once again, 1979 was a landmark year in the history o...

The 2021 Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament is now over, and the Baylor Bears are your 2021 champions. With the 2021 season now complete, it is time to look back and reflect on the year that was. The subject for today is one that has always fascinated me: how to quantify the performance of coaches and teams in the NCAA Tournament. PASE Yourself There are dozens are different ways to measure performance in March. The most obvious ones include stats like total wins, overall win percentages, Final Fours, and National Titles. The Spartans and Head Coach Tom Izzo are in the top 10 in all four of these categories in the modern era (which I define as from 1979 on, which was the first year the teams were seeded and that the tournament expanded to beyond 32 teams or less). That said, not all paths in the NCAA Tournament are equal, and therefore making comparisons based on these raw metrics does not provide a complete picture. In fact, the structure of the tournament is specifically design to ...