By Dan Loman

If Grayson Allen and Duke does well in the NCAA Tournament, it’ll be because of their talent and not because they peaked at the right time.





Everyone has their own criteria and things that they look for when filling out a bracket. Whether it’s picking the home team, the team with multiple future NBA players, or the team with the coolest mascot (go Norse!), most college basketball fans have something that they lean on when penciling a team to the next round. Here at Bracket Voodoo, our goal is to dispel the myths of bracketology to help you optimize your bracket and increase your odds of cutting down the nets in your office pool. Last year, we focused on recency bias and found that historical team tourney performance doesn’t matter (if you don’t believe me, just ask Jay Wright and Villanova). This year, we looked at another common talking point - are teams with momentum heading into the tournament more likely to succeed?



To answer this question I looked at three different performance metrics using data from the past 5 seasons (2012-2016): Winning the conference tournament, wins over the past 10 games and win percentage in February and March vs win percentage from the beginning of the season. To normalize things a bit, I only considered teams from conferences which got more than one team into the tournament, and used tournament wins over expected as a measure for success (expected tournament wins were calculated as function of team quality and opponent quality). Ultimately, I found that momentum heading into the tournament has virtually no correlation with tournament success.

Winning the Conference Tournament:

One of the major things people look at when filling out their bracket is a team’s success in their conference tournament. Surely a team that won their conference tournament is riding high and has proven capable of winning in March, so they’d be a good bet to advance far in the NCAA Tournament. Recent history would suggest otherwise. As the chart below shows, getting into the tournament as an automatic bid vs an at large bid makes virtually no difference when it comes to tournament success:

The seven biggest overachievers of the past 5 years, a group that includes UConn and Kentucky in 2014, Wichita St. in 2013 and Syracuse last year, did not win their conference tournaments. If we went back to 2011, the First Four to Final Four VCU team didn’t, either. In fact, on average, teams that lost in their conference tournaments have fared slightly better than teams that won it: conference tourney losers have won .02 games over expected compared to .07 games under expected for conference tourney champs. In aggregate though, the difference is slight and statistically insignificant, so it’s best to disregard conference champion status when filling out your bracket.



What this really says is that the selection committee does a good job of weighing the value of a conference tournament victory when seeding teams. Winning their conference tournament will give teams a boost in their seeding and overall rating, since they likely picked up good wins along the way. That increases expectations - by my calculations, conference tourney winners were expected to win roughly .4 games more in the NCAA Tournament than conference tourney losers (since I excluded teams from one bid leagues) over the past 5 years. So teams that got in as automatic bids tend to meet those higher expectations at about the same rate as at-large teams.

Last 10 games:

There’s also virtually no correlation between a team’s record in its previous 10 games and its success in the NCAA Tournament. As the chart below shows, teams have performed similarly relative to expectations no matter how hot they were over the 10 games leading up to the tournament:

Interestingly, of the six teams that went 10-0 over their previous 10 games before the NCAA Tournament, only one (Florida in 2014) outperformed expectations. The group with a losing record in their previous 10 games also underperformed on average, though Syracuse went just 4-6 before the 2016 NCAA Tournament and managed to shock the world by reaching the Final Four. Overall, however, the difference among groups is small and statistically insignificant, suggesting that recent performance over a 10 game period is not predictive of NCAA Tournament success.

End of Season vs Beginning of Season:

They say that all games are created equal, and that games in November count just as much as the games in March when the committee decides who goes dancing. Turns out, the same more or less holds true for winning in the Big Dance - as the chart below shows, teams that do better late in the season tend to perform about the same as teams that appear to have peaked early.

You may remember in 2013, when a Trey Burke-led Michigan team won 95% of their games before February and was ranked #1 overall at one point in the season. They stumbled into the tournament winning just 50% of their games since, but ended up reaching the finals before losing to Louisville. On the flip side, Virginia won 92% of their games after February 1st in 2014 (compared to 76% before), and failed to meet expectations as a 1 seed. Overall, recent NCAA Tournament history suggests that a team’s overall body of work matters more than their recent performance.

To summarize, we recommend not getting caught up in recent performance when filling out your bracket this year. Don’t overvalue teams because they won their conference tournaments, or sleep on them because they struggled a bit down the gate. You’re better off looking at a team’s overall rating (like our power rankings here) and overall body of work throughout the year. And if you get stuck, check out our bracket optimizer for help with those tricky picks.

From all of us at Bracket Voodoo, good luck and happy Madness!