College Basketball Overvalues March Madness Results

As the spring semester starts to wind down at most schools across the United States, it also brings an end to the frantic period of colleges introducing their new head coaches and finalizing their recruiting classes.

Expectations are on everyone’s mind during the offseason (for proof, look no further than these mash-ups of introductory press conferences of new head coaches preaching pace and culture from Jordan Sperber), and no team faces higher standards than Duke. Coach K’s Blue Devils, coming off a season where they entered the NCAA Tournament as the #1 overall seed and reached the Elite Eight, have secured their fourth-straight top-ranked recruiting class.

Led by returning point guard Tre Jones and three five-star recruits, Duke is poised to be highly competitive once again, something that has not gone unnoticed by media outlets. However, are the expectations for this program too high? I’ve seen many comments arguing that despite all of their talent, Duke won’t even win the National Championship next year, to which my natural reaction is, “well yeah, probably”.

This got me to thinking: if the main barometer of success for major college basketball programs is their March Madness results (specifically, their number of Final Fours and titles), then we are severely overlooking regular season success in favor of a notoriously unpredictable tournament.

It’s not hard to understand why we do this. March Madness is the ultimate money maker. Advancing in the tournament provides schools with a higher proportion of revenues, along with national attention and a boost to future recruiting. Coaches can earn huge bonuses (Virginia’s Tony Bennett earned $1.25 million over the course of this year’s tournament) and use a strong showing to garner attention for bigger jobs. You can be successful in the regular season, but March Madness is where winning gets noticed.

Especially following their loss to 16-seed UMBC in the 2018 tournament, the Virginia Cavaliers were considered tournament underachievers. Now with a title under their belts, that will no longer be the case. And despite making March Madness every year since Mark Few took over in 1999-00, many thought Gonzaga was incapable of contending for a title until they did just that, reaching the championship game in 2017.

Like Virginia and Gonzaga, Duke is another team whose tournament success is under constant scrutiny. Critics will be quick to point out that the Blue Devils have made just two Final Fours over the past 15 years. Disregarding the fact that those were both National Championships, and that extending to the past 20 years, Duke has two additional Final Fours and a third title (can you tell I’m not buying this argument?), how big an underachievement could two Final Fours in 15 years really be?

Only 15 of over 350 Division I schools have made multiple Final Fours over the last 15 years. Less than 10% of schools (31) have made even one. While Duke does trail blue bloods like Michigan State and North Carolina (who lead the way with 5), Kentucky (4), and Kansas (3), I would argue this level of success is extremely hard to maintain over time. For example, UCLA and Indiana, who have a combined 16 championships, have not made the Final Four since 2008 and 2002, respectively. If repeated tournament success is so difficult, why not focus on something equally difficult but more controllable and arguably more impressive: regular season dominance?

Yet, tons of teams enter every season with Final Four aspirations, leading to inevitable disappointment. It’s not like we can blame them – you dream of championships, not 20, 25, 30-win seasons. But those title visions can neglect real achievement. Contrary to many, I don’t think Duke underperformed this past season. I understand the championship or bust mentality, especially considering how the team featured the top three overall recruits and were already being talked about before the season as one of the potentially greatest teams ever, but let’s bring ourselves back down to reality.

Duke was the #1 overall seed in the tournament. That means entering March Madness, they were deemed the best team in the country. How can that be a disappointment? Yet, they still lost five games during the regular season, a testament to how difficult it is to go undefeated in today’s college basketball.

In the last 40 seasons, only three teams have entered March Madness undefeated. The last undefeated champion was Indiana, who finished 32-0 in 1976. It’s worth noting that now, an undefeated season requires a team to win around 40 games.

Entering March Madness, Duke had an overall record of 29-5, good for a win rate of .853. Using the tournament as a pure extension of the regular season, a team that wins 85.3% of their games has only a 52.9% chance of winning four in a row, which would get them to the Final Four. That’s basically a coin flip, without even considering that the average March Madness game is tougher than Duke’s average regular season game, even in a conference as strong as the ACC. Historically, #1 seeds have made the Final Four just over 40% of the time.

A single-elimination tournament, while adding intensity and excitement to each match, also increases variance tremendously. There’s a reason why major upsets rarely occur in the NBA Playoffs. The seven-game series is not designed for the underdog. Anyone can beat a team once, but four times? It would be very difficult to argue March Madness has been bad for college basketball, but by inviting chaos, you decrease the chance of the best team coming out on top.

As long as we acknowledge the inherent randomness of the NCAA Tournament and that teams can advance further than superior teams (after all, that’s what upsets are – no one actually thinks 2018 UMBC was a better team than 2018 Virginia), we’ll be fine. The unpredictability of March Madness is a big part of why it’s so great. Let’s just not let one bad performance tell the story of a team’s season when their first 30+ games do a much better job.